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Prediction markets platform Polymarket is expanding into trading of perpetual futures contacts, the company said Tuesday.
The announcement comes on the heels of a report from The Information that its main rival Kalshi has plans to offer crypto trading, including perpetuals. These are futures contracts that stay open indefinitely, allowing traders to hold leveraged exposure and exit anytime they want as long as they have enough funds to maintain it.
Polymarket has not specified whether its offering will include crypto perpetual futures, but the company is highly crypto friendly. It’s built on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains and denominates trades primarily in the stablecoin USDC. Crypto traders were major drivers of Polymarket’s meteoric rise in 2024.
The move puts Kalshi — and perhaps Polymarket, if its offering includes crypto perpetuals — in more direct competition with Robinhood, Coinbase and Kraken, all of which have added prediction markets into their offerings in the past year, highlighting the value of young, speculative and risk-tolerant retail traders.
While not widely available in the U.S., international perpetuals, or “perps,” became especially popular among the crypto crowd in the industry’s early years as a workaround to traditional finance limitations. Last year, the top Last year, the top centralized crypto exchanges registered $86.2 trillion in annual perps volume and 47% growth from the previous year, according to CoinGecko.
By expanding into perps, Polymarket and Kalshi are tapping into derivatives trading at a time when cryptocurrency prices have stalled and trading activity has slowed – even if signs of longer-term institutional demand remain intact.
Perps have the ability to keep the ecosystem active by generating more consistent volume and allowing traders to speculate on short-term moves, hedge existing positions, and use leverage — regardless of the direction of the market.
Neither Kalshi nor Polymarket responded to a request for comment.
—CNBC’s Liz Napolitano contributed reporting.
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a CNBC minority investment.
