Kalshi Files With CFTC to List Perpetual Futures on Stocks, Copper

Kalshi has filed with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to list perpetual futures contracts tied to the MerQube US Large Cap Index and to copper, according to the filing reported by two independent outlets. If approved, the products would mark one of the clearest attempts yet to bring crypto-native perpetual futures mechanics into mainstream equity and commodity markets.

Perpetual futures — contracts with no expiry date that use periodic funding payments to keep their price anchored to an underlying asset — have been a core building block of crypto derivatives trading for years on platforms like Binance and Bybit. Kalshi’s filing signals an effort to port that same structure onto a mainstream equity benchmark and an industrial metal, rather than a token.

What the filing covers

The MerQube US Large Cap Index tracks a basket of large-capitalization U.S. equities, giving traders a way to take leveraged, expiry-free exposure to broad American stock market performance through a single perpetual contract. The copper perpetual would extend the same model to a commodity whose price is closely watched as a proxy for global industrial demand and manufacturing activity.

Both products would sit under CFTC oversight, the regulator that already supervises Kalshi’s existing lineup of event-contract and prediction-market offerings. Kalshi has built its business around CFTC-regulated contracts on economic data, elections and other real-world outcomes, and the new filing would broaden that regulatory wrapper to cover leveraged, continuously-traded exposure to stocks and metals.

Why it matters for crypto traders

Perpetual futures have historically lived almost entirely outside U.S. regulatory perimeters, traded on offshore crypto exchanges rather than CFTC-registered venues. A domestic, regulated perpetuals market for equities and commodities would give U.S. traders a compliant on-shore alternative to the funding-rate-driven leverage products that crypto markets popularized — potentially pulling volume and infrastructure expertise from crypto-native venues into regulated U.S. market plumbing.

It also underscores how thoroughly crypto market structure has begun to influence traditional finance product design. Funding-rate perpetuals were a niche crypto invention a decade ago; their arrival at a CFTC-regulated stock-index and commodity venue suggests regulators and mainstream trading firms increasingly view the mechanism as exportable beyond digital assets.

The filing does not guarantee approval, and the CFTC has not indicated a timeline for reviewing Kalshi’s request. Traders should treat the products as pending rather than live until the regulator formally signs off.

Sources

• theblock.co
• beincrypto.com