Kalshi Files for Equity Perps: What the US500 Perp Means and Why Wall Street Just Started Trading

On August 18, Kalshi filed to launch perpetual futures tied to the U.S. stock market. On August 19, Cantor Fitzgerald and Susquehanna announced they would start trading Kalshi contracts at institutional scale.

Those two headlines belong together. Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated prediction market that built its $37.7 billion July on World Cup contracts, is trying to become a multi-asset financial exchange, and Wall Street will walk through the door the moment it does.

Here is what the filing actually says, what perpetuals are, and why the US500 perp and the Cantor block-trade deal matter more than the valuation headlines.

What Kalshi Filed For

In a filing with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on August 18, Kalshi sought approval to launch perpetual futures tied to equity indexes, as well as a separate filing for the industrial metal copper.

The flagship product is the "US500" perp, tied to the MerQube U.S. Large Cap Index, a benchmark that tracks the 500 largest companies listed and based in the U.S. It sits alongside two earlier expansions: perpetuals tied to cryptocurrencies, approved in late May, and a July filing for precious metals like gold and silver.

CEO Tarek Mansour and engineer Lior Hirschfeld have been explicit about the ambition. "This is the next step towards building the largest exchange on the planet," Hirschfeld said at the June perps launch event. The US500 filing puts that quote in context: Kalshi wants listed exposure to equities, crypto, metals, and event contracts in a single CFTC-regulated venue.

There is an important qualifier: filing is not approval. Crypto perps cleared in early June. Precious metals and the new equity and copper perps are still pending with the CFTC.

What a Perp Actually Is

A perpetual future, "perp", is a futures contract with no expiration date. You can go long or short the price of an underlying index and hold the position indefinitely, with a funding way or mechanism that keeps the contract tethered to the spot price.

That matters for a prediction market audience because perps behave differently from event contracts. Event contracts, "Will the Fed cut in September?" or "Who wins the House in 2026?", expire and settle at $1 or $0. Perps never expire; they trade like a leveraged spot position with continuous settlement. Kalshi is now trying to run both under one roof: binary event contracts that resolve, and perpetual futures that do not.

The competitive signal is not subtle. When Kalshi's crypto perps were approved in June, the stocks of traditional futures exchanges, CME Group and CBOE Global Markets, fell amid fears of competition. CME has since sued the CFTC in federal court over the approval. After the August equity filing, CME was up 2% and CBOE up 0.2%, the market treating the filing as pending, not done.

Why the US500 Matters More Than Crypto Perps

Crypto perps gave Kalshi a foot in the door with the easiest approve-first asset class. An equity index perp is the harder, larger prize.

First, it puts Kalshi in direct competition with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures complex, which is the backbone of U.S. derivatives and the CME's most liquid products. Second, it creates the first CFTC-regulated perpetual tied to U.S. large-cap equities available to retail on a venue that already has distribution through Robinhood, Webull, and its own app. Third, it changes Kalshi's revenue mix. In July, sports contracts accounted for roughly 80% of Kalshi's volume. Post-World Cup, that share has already fallen to about 60%. Perps are the hedge against what the industry calls the "event flywheel" problem: how to keep volume between the peaks.

Kalshi has paired the product push with a structural hire: Jeff Bandman, the lawyer who helped Kalshi secure its CFTC exchange license in 2020, returned this week as CEO of Kalshi Prime, the unit serving margin perpetual futures customers.

Wall Street Walked In the Next Day

On August 19, Kalshi announced that Cantor Fitzgerald will serve as a broker for institutional block trades on its event contracts and Susquehanna International Group will provide pricing and liquidity as the market maker for those trades.

That sentence is worth unpacking. Block trades are large, privately negotiated transactions executed outside the public order book to avoid moving the price, the standard mechanism for institutional trading. Until now, prediction markets have been almost entirely retail. Cantor first reached out to Kalshi a few months ago, according to spokesperson Elisabeth Diana, and the bank can now request that Kalshi design new markets for clients.

The initial client interest, Diana said, is in Kalshi's climate, weather, and economic indicator markets, not just sports. Cantor's co-CEO Pascal Bandelier was blunt about the gap: "Prediction markets are growing rapidly, but institutional participation has not kept pace because investors could not transact at scale on a regulated exchange. The liquidity is here."

Susquehanna's head of business development, Joe Grubb, called institutional risk transfer "the next step for prediction markets' material growth." The firm will make markets on the Cantor-organized trades, providing the continuous pricing institutions require.

This is not Kalshi's first institutional trade; the platform completed its first block trade on an event contract in April, but it is the first time a bulge-bracket broker and a major market maker have committed to the venue by name. For context, Polymarket's July volume was $12.9 billion combined across its international and U.S. venues; Kalshi's was $37.7 billion. Kalshi's pitch to institutions is liquidity, a CFTC license, and product breadth: it currently lists 28,996 active markets, compared with Polymarket's 8,040.

The $40 Billion Context

The filings and the Cantor deal landed the same week Kalshi was reported to be in advanced talks with Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management to raise at least $750 million at a $40 billion valuation, per The Information on August 13.

The terms tell the story: Sequoia, already an investor with a board seat, would deepen its stake; Wellington, with $1.3 trillion in client assets, would enter for the first time. Kalshi raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation in May. Its annualized revenue was about $4 billion in July, driven largely by the World Cup, and it claims 95% of the U.S. prediction market by revenue. Rival Polymarket, for comparison, was last reported seeking funding at a $20 billion valuation after a $600 million investment from Intercontinental Exchange at a $15 billion valuation.

Kalshi is considering an IPO in 2027, Mansour said in June. A $40 billion private round buys the time and the balance sheet to launch perps, build Prime, and weather the legal fights with states. Washington became the fourth state blocking Kalshi on August 15, joining Michigan, Nevada, and Massachusetts.

What It Means for Prediction Market Traders

Product risk is now market-structure risk. If the CFTC approves equity perps, Kalshi's daily volume will no longer hinge on the sports calendar. That is good for liquidity, but it also means a bad regulatory decision on perps reprices the whole venue. The arbitrage guide still applies, but the venue you arbitrage on matters more.

Institutional flow changes the order book. Block trades keep large orders off the lit market, which reduces slippage for retail but also means the public price can lag the institutional one. If you trade economic or weather markets, the contracts Cantor's clients want, expect tighter spreads and faster repricing after data prints. The logic for trading the Fed, CPI, and jobs via event contracts, as covered in our economic markets guide, still holds; the counterparties have just gotten larger.

Perps are not event contracts; size them differently. Event contracts cap at $1 and expire. Perps have no cap, no expiry, and leverage. The position-sizing discipline in our bankroll guide matters more here than anywhere else on the platform.

In General

Kalshi filed for the product that would make it a real futures exchange, and Wall Street announced it was ready to trade on it, within 24 hours. The perps are not approved, the block trades are not yet flowing at scale, and the $40 billion valuation is not closed. All of that can still change.

What will not change is the direction: prediction markets are being rebuilt as financial exchanges with perpetuals, prime brokerage, and institutional pipes. The Cantor and Susquehanna names on the press release are the first proof that the rebuild has buyers.