Kalshi crossed $1 billion in trading volume last week. Not over months. Days. That is the kind of number that makes the rest of the U.S. derivatives industry sit up, and it landed barely a week after the prediction-market platform switched on regulated crypto perpetual futures.
Which brings us to the argument now circulating among the people who run these desks: that perpetual futures could be crypto's next ETF moment in the United States. The phrasing comes from Kraken, specifically John Palmer, who oversees the exchange's global derivatives business. He laid out the case in an interview with CoinDesk. The comparison is worth taking seriously, if only because the man making it is about to launch the product himself.
For the uninitiated: perpetual futures, or perps, let traders hold a leveraged position with no expiration date. Regular futures contracts expire. You buy a June contract, June comes, and if you want to keep your exposure you roll into the next month and eat the costs of doing so. Perps skip that ritual entirely. Funding-rate payments between longs and shorts keep the contract pinned to spot. Globally, they dominate crypto derivatives volume by a wide margin. American traders, until very recently, mostly could not touch the regulated version.
How Kraken got the keys
Kraken's path onshore ran through two acquisitions: NinjaTrader and Bitnomial. Together those deals handed the exchange the CFTC-regulated pieces it needed: a futures commission merchant license, an exchange, and clearing. The company plans to switch on perpetual futures on Kraken Pro within weeks.
Palmer's adoption thesis borrows directly from January 2024, when spot bitcoin ETFs finally cleared the SEC. Retail and sophisticated traders piled in almost immediately. The big asset managers and registered investment advisers came later, in his words "in a trailing fashion," because they had committees, due-diligence checklists and internal governance to satisfy before anyone could click buy. He expects perps to repeat that sequence. Proprietary trading shops first, the cautious institutional money behind them.
It is a tidy analogy, and probably a correct one. I would add a caveat the ETF comparison glosses over. A spot ETF is a buy-and-hold wrapper. A perpetual future is a leveraged instrument whose funding mechanics can chew up an unprepared retail account in an afternoon. Mass adoption and mass comprehension are not the same thing.
The simplicity argument is real, though. Palmer credits perps' offshore success largely to their structure: no expirations, no rolls, fewer moving parts than dated futures. Kraken also wants to eventually let traders post crypto assets as collateral, which would close more of the gap with venues like Hyperliquid.
The fight over what these things actually are
Here is where the regulated U.S. perps story gets thornier. Kalshi's launch reopened a definitional argument that lawyers and derivatives veterans have been chewing on for years. Are perpetual futures actually futures, or are they swaps wearing a futures costume?
That clash played out on a recent episode of The Policy Protocol, as CoinDesk recounted. John Lothian, who publishes John Lothian News, argues the funding-rate mechanism creates recurring bilateral cash flows between participants, and that is swap behavior. Udesh Jha, Kalshi's head of exchange analytics, counters that perps are exchange-traded, centrally cleared and built to track spot, which puts them squarely in futures territory. Funding rates, in his telling, just make financing costs visible instead of baking them into the price.
This is not a semantic squabble. The label decides the rulebook. Were regulators to treat perps as swaps, retail access could narrow significantly unless Congress or the CFTC built a fresh framework. Tax treatment, customer protections and the competitive math against offshore platforms all hang on the classification. Lothian also flagged manipulation risk around funding-rate windows, the worry being that traders could nudge prices near settlement. Jha's response: Kalshi calculates funding continuously across the cycle, not at one closing snapshot, which he says blunts that incentive.
Nobody settled it on air, and nobody is going to settle it soon.
Palmer, for his part, is not pretending the U.S. market is mature. Crypto derivatives generate trillions in annual volume worldwide, and the domestic regulated slice is barely a sliver of that. "We're at the national anthem still," he said, which is a better line than most executives manage.
Watch two things over the coming months. First, whether the volume Kalshi posted holds or proves to be a launch-week spike. Second, whether the CFTC says anything that hardens, or scrambles, the futures-versus-swaps question I keep coming back to. The product is here. The legal definition of it is still being written.