The Perp Is Coming for Tesla, Apple and Nvidia

The contract that conquered crypto is now lining up on the biggest stocks in the world. Kalshi, the prediction-market shop turned derivatives exchange, plans to seek regulatory approval to list perpetual futures — perps — on Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, along with other single stocks and popular ETFs. The one hard number on what it wants is the size bar: companies with a market value of at least $100 billion.

If you've traded crypto in the last five years, you already know the beast. If you haven't, here's the short version. A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiration date. You never own the stock or the coin — you post margin and bet on direction, with leverage that amplifies both wins and losses. Instead of settling at an expiry, every eight hours longs and shorts pay each other a small "funding" fee that keeps the contract price glued to the real spot price. Remove the expiry and you remove the reason to ever roll the position, and you remove the worry that a dated contract will expire and force you to act. You can hold a view for a day or a decade.

That one structural change — no expiry — is why the perp beat the dated futures it competed against in crypto, and why the offshore markets that host the bulk of this trading went vertical: global perpetual volume grew from roughly $28 trillion in 2023 to about $90 trillion in 2025. The primitive that reduces friction wins, and an expiring contract is friction. Around the clock and pre-loaded with leverage, the perp was always the lower-friction instrument.

Kalshi is the first to bring the thing onshore under a U.S. regulator. On May 29, 2026, it went live with crypto perps — the first perpetual futures in American history under CFTC regulation — and its crypto perps crossed $1 billion in notional volume within a week. The single-stock push is the next rung of the same ladder. But it is the rung where the ladder changes shape, because stocks are not crypto.

The regulator's turf is the real gate

Here is the plumbing, in the version that matters. Perps tied to a broad equity index — the S&P-style "US500" basket Kalshi filed in August — are the CFTC's turf alone, because a broad-based basket of stocks is treated as a commodity index, not a security. No SEC sign-off. A perp tied to a single stock is different: legally it is a "security future," and security futures require approval from both the SEC and the CFTC. That is the gate. It is also why the announcement reads "plans to seek approval" rather than "live," and why this particular battle is as much a turf fight between two regulators as it is a product launch.

Turf is the operative word. In June, the CME Group — the incumbent futures exchange that has long been the default place to bet on U.S. market direction — sued the CFTC over the whole perp concept, arguing the contracts are swaps rather than futures and that the regulator overstepped. The CFTC called the lawsuit frivolous and moved to dismiss it. You don't have to pick a winner in that suit to see what it is: the established venue trying to keep a lower-friction rival off its lawn. Every time a disrupter crosses a regulated boundary, the incumbents reach for the regulators. That dynamic has never once stopped the primitive from winning in the end.

We've tried this before

And this is not the first time American exchanges attempted single-stock futures. They debuted in the U.S. in 2002 on an exchange called OneChicago and flopped; the last of them traded there in 2020. They died for a mundane reason: they were expiring contracts competing against options and leveraged ETFs that rolled more cheaply and more conveniently. The friction killed them. The perp's entire reason for existing is that it removes that friction.

But the stronger evidence that this generation sticks is offshore, where the demand is already proven. On Hyperliquid, the unregulated venue at the center of the explosion, single-stock perp volume surged to about $212 billion, from $4 billion at the start of the year. Retail hasn't been waiting for permission; it's been trading Tesla and Nvidia perps on overseas venues regardless. Competitors are moving too — Coinbase has filed paperwork that could clear the way for its own single-stock perps, and Polymarket launched perps in September with up to 20x leverage on many of the same names. Kalshi's pitch to regulators is essentially: the volume is already happening offshore and unregulated, so the responsible move is to let it happen onshore where it can be watched.

What changes for you

Here is the honest part for an ordinary investor, because this is what actually changes for you. None of this makes Tesla, Apple or Nvidia better or worse investments — a new chassis for betting doesn't change the car. What it changes is your access to a leveraged, around-the-clock directional bet on stocks you already recognize, with costs that accrue mechanically.

Three costs you will feel. First, funding: every eight hours longs pay shorts (or vice versa) to keep the contract anchored, so holding a position that fights the crowd bleeds you in small installments. Second, liquidation: because you're leveraged, an adverse move automatically closes your position — margin is collateral and it depletes; you don't get to wait it out. Third, the 24/7 promise cuts both ways. A crypto perp anchors to a cash market that never closes. A stock perp anchors to a cash market that sleeps — the underlying exchange closes at 4 p.m. and reopens at 9:30 — so part of the engineering is deciding what "spot" means at 3 a.m., and who is setting the liquidation trigger while the reference price is derived rather than traded. The leverage ceilings on Kalshi's crypto perps have been modest — about 6x on Bitcoin, 4.5x on Ether — but lower leverage is still leverage, and a leveraged position held through a weekend you aren't watching is a leveraged position that no longer belongs to you by Monday.

That last part is the piece of the mechanism worth remembering. The perp is not complicated the way a many-layered structured product is complicated; it is a margin loan with a knife. Its power, and its danger, is that it converts a stock you could have simply held into a position that settles your fate on a timer you set. The primitive will keep winning, onshore or offshore — that is what lower friction does. Just remember which side of the funding ledger you are on, because in a market that never closes, someone is always being paid to be on the other side.