Kalshi Wants Perpetual Futures on Tesla and Nvidia, Around the Clock

Kalshi, the US-regulated prediction-market exchange, intends to seek approval for about 60 perpetual futures contracts referencing individual stocks and exchange-traded funds, including Tesla and Nvidia, trading 24 hours a day, CoinDesk reported. A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry date that tracks a reference price through periodic funding payments between longs and shorts. The structure was invented in crypto and, until now, has lived there.

Applying it to equities is a bigger step than it sounds. Listed shares stop trading at the closing bell and settle through a clearing system with fixed hours. A perpetual on Nvidia would keep quoting through the night, the weekend and every holiday, with funding rates rather than an underlying market doing the work of keeping it honest.

The turf question comes first

CoinDesk framed the plan against a live dispute over jurisdiction. Prediction markets and event contracts sit with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which allows exchanges to self-certify new products. Securities and products referencing them sit with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A perpetual future on a single named listed company sits, awkwardly, in between.

That argument is already on the record elsewhere. Citadel Securities has urged the SEC to assert oversight of event contracts tied to public companies, challenging the self-certification route, The Block reported. The same logic points at equity perps: if a contract's value is determined entirely by the price of a registered security, the case for treating it as a commodity derivative gets thinner.

Why anyone wants this

The demand side is straightforward. Crypto traders are used to leveraged, always-open exposure with no roll and no expiry, and there is no equivalent in listed equities for a retail account. Weekend price discovery in stocks currently happens in thin, scattered places, including tokenized equities, which turned over $1.01bn across a closed-market weekend according to The Defiant.

So there is an existing appetite for stock exposure outside market hours, and Kalshi's proposal is a bid to serve it through a federally regulated venue rather than an offshore one. Whether US regulators want that appetite served at all, and by whom, is the unanswered part.

What approval would actually settle

If a contract of this kind is cleared through the CFTC route, it establishes that a leveraged, perpetual claim on a single listed company can be listed without SEC registration. That is a precedent with a long tail, and it would apply well beyond one venue.

If it is instead pushed to the SEC, the timeline stretches and the product arrives, if at all, inside the securities regime with the disclosure and market-structure obligations that come with it. Either outcome shapes how the next few years of round-the-clock equity exposure gets built, which is why the filing matters more than the ticker list attached to it.