Kalshi’s application to list a perpetual future on US large-cap stocks doubles as a rebuttal to the lawsuit that could determine whether perpetual contracts belong in CFTC-regulated markets at all.
KalshiEX LLC submitted the US500 contract to the CFTC for review on 18 August under the exchange’s voluntary product approval process.
The contract tracks the MerQube US Large Cap Index rather than the S&P 500 itself, sidestepping the licensing arrangements built around S&P Dow Jones Indices. The index is a float-weighted benchmark of the 500 largest US-listed and domiciled companies — similar in construction to the S&P 500, but administered independently.
It is quoted in index points with a $1 multiplier per point and a minimum tick of $0.05, and trades continuously from 6:00 pm ET Sunday to 5:00 pm ET Friday. Funding, however, is calculated only against the index’s regular US equity-session prices, from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm ET, and is settled daily at the 4:00 pm close.
Part of a Broader Build-out
The filing extends an expansion that began in May, when the CFTC approved Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual futures contract - the first perpetual future permitted on a US-regulated exchange.
That product generated more than $5.5 billion in trading volume within its first two weeks. Kalshi followed with an application for gold and silver perpetuals last month and, on the same day as the US500 filing, a separate application for copper perpetuals.
Each filing extends the same structure of a futures contract with no expiration date, settled through daily funding payments into a market Kalshi hasn’t previously covered.
The timing aligns with a broader shift the CFTC has said it wants to encourage. Perpetual futures originated almost entirely offshore, largely because US regulators had not approved a domestic listing.
In its US500 filing, Kalshi cites CFTC Chairman Michael Selig’s stated goal of “onshoring” perpetual products that developed abroad “due to regulatory uncertainty” — the same rationale it used to justify the bitcoin perpetual in May.
BitMEX, the exchange that invented the leveraged crypto perpetual swap in 2014 and built its business offshore, announced on 23 July that it would shut down by 23 September, citing a strategic review of the business and the broader market.
- Nevada Wants $120K a Day from Kalshi Over Geofence Failures. Kalshi Says the Testers Cheated
- Kalshi Launches Real-Time Level 2 Data Feed for Institutional Traders
- CFTC Orders Kalshi to Stay Open as New York Seeks $36 Billion
The Filing is Also a Legal Argument
CME is suing the CFTC in federal court over its May approval of Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual. The exchange argues the product is actually a swap, not a future, meaning that regulating it as a future gives Kalshi an easier, unfairly favourable set of rules to work under.
Kalshi and the CFTC disagree. They claim it's simply a new kind of futures contract, one that never expires instead of settling on a fixed date. Kalshi's US500 filing leans on that same argument.
The filing points to features like a standardised contract size, central clearing through Kalshi Klear, margin requirements, and the ability to exit a position by trading in the opposite direction.
The CFTC has not set a timeline for reviewing the US500 filing. The agency’s approval of Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual will directly affect that review in the CME lawsuit.
