Kalshi has filed a proposed rule change with the Securities and Exchange Commission and submitted a separate proposal to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to offer perpetual futures contracts on individual US stocks. The filing, made Friday, September 18, 2026, arrived the same day Coinbase submitted its own proposal for similar products, and alongside a filing by Payward, the parent company of Kraken, through Bitnomial Exchange. Three of the most prominent US trading platforms are now simultaneously pushing regulators to let them bring a crypto-native financial instrument into the market for shares of publicly traded companies.
The push matters because it would mark the first time perpetual futures, a derivatives product that originated in crypto trading and has no fixed expiration date, become available on individual US equities through regulated exchanges. If approved, traders could hold positions on stocks like Tesla or Apple indefinitely, with periodic funding payments keeping the contract price tethered to the underlying share price, rather than settling on a set date the way traditional futures do.
How Perpetuals Work and Why Exchanges Want Them
Perpetual futures have become one of the most heavily traded instruments in global crypto markets because they let traders take leveraged, long-term directional bets without the friction of rolling over contracts before expiration. Kalshi already offers this structure domestically for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and XRP, and received CFTC approval for its Bitcoin perpetual contract back in May. That approval effectively established a regulatory template the exchange now wants to extend to stocks.
Under Kalshi’s proposal, the stock perpetuals would be classified as security futures products and would clear through Kalshi Klear, the company’s CFTC-registered clearinghouse. That structural choice signals an attempt to fit a crypto-born product into the existing plumbing of US securities and derivatives regulation rather than seeking an entirely new framework. Payward’s plans are narrower but concrete: it intends to initially list perpetual futures on ten US equities, including Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, with an ambition to support 24 hours a day, five days a week trading, well beyond the standard market hours of the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. Coinbase’s parallel filing for single-stock perpetual futures underscores that this is not one exchange testing the waters but a coordinated industry move.
What It Means for Regulation and Markets
The timing is not incidental. These filings landed just days after the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act on September 15, legislation that would have given crypto markets a clearer statutory division of authority between the SEC and CFTC. That vote fell short of the 60 votes needed, leaving the two agencies to define the rules of engagement largely on their own. SEC Chair Paul Atkins responded by saying the agency would act within its existing authority to provide regulatory certainty, a signal that exchanges have clearly taken as an invitation to test how far current rules can stretch. Kalshi, Coinbase and Payward are essentially asking regulators to answer, contract by contract, questions that Congress declined to settle through legislation.
For everyday market participants, the implications are significant even before any approval is granted. Perpetual futures on individual stocks would blur a line that has long separated the equity markets, with their fixed trading hours, settlement dates and disclosure regimes, from the largely unregulated, always-on world of crypto derivatives. Round-the-clock trading of instruments tied to shares of Apple or Nvidia would represent a structural change in how retail and institutional traders can express views on those companies, independent of whether the underlying stock exchanges are open. It would also test whether the CFTC’s clearinghouse framework, built for commodities and now crypto assets, can safely absorb products referencing equities without introducing new systemic risks.
What Comes Next
None of these products can launch without regulatory sign-off, and that approval process is the immediate thing to watch. The CFTC will need to evaluate Kalshi’s and Payward’s proposals, while the SEC reviews Kalshi’s rule change and Coinbase’s separate filing, likely drawing on the same reasoning that led to May’s approval of Kalshi’s Bitcoin perpetual contract. Observers should also watch whether the two agencies coordinate publicly, given that stock perpetuals sit awkwardly between securities and derivatives jurisdiction, a gap the CLARITY Act was designed to close. As detailed in reporting on how the SEC and CFTC are improvising a crypto rulebook piece by piece, this pattern of agency-led decisions is becoming the default path for market structure questions that Congress has not resolved. Traders and companies alike will also be watching whether other exchanges follow with their own filings, and whether the Senate’s failure to pass the CLARITY Act prompts a renewed legislative push or simply cements a regulatory landscape shaped contract by contract, filing by filing.
Source: Cointelegraph
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.
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