Plus500 started offering Kalshi’s perpetual futures through its US brokerage today (Wednesday). It said it is the first futures commission merchant (FCM) to do so apart from Kalshi Prime, the exchange’s own brokerage.
Perpetual futures, or perps, never expire, so traders can hold a position without rolling it into a new contract. Plus500 executes, routes and clears the trades on its own systems, as a clearing member of Kalshi Klear.
The contracts are new to regulated US markets and have drawn volume quickly. Kalshi said its perps traded more than $5.5 billion in their first two weeks after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approved the first one in May.
Plus500 is offering them to institutional clients and to partner brokers that run their customers’ trading on its systems.
London’s trading industry is coming home!
Webull Plans the Same Contracts From November
Outside brokers are only starting to carry Kalshi’s perps, and the announcements so far put Plus500 first to go live. Webull said on October 20 that eligible US customers will get Kalshi-listed crypto perps through Webull Futures accounts from November, also cleared by Kalshi Klear.
Plus500 Chief Executive David Zruia said the product’s “arrival on a fully regulated US exchange is a significant boost for the whole industry.”
Crypto exchanges reached US traders by other means. Coinbase runs perpetual-style futures that settle funding twice a day, and Kraken has a US venue with 16 contracts, FinanceMagnates.com reported in June.
Volume on the exchange has kept building since launch. Kalshi’s crypto perps had generated about $16.1 billion in volume by late July, roughly three times the two-week figure, before the exchange added commodities and indices.
Event Contracts Came First
Perps are the latest step in Plus500’s US push. It began clearing event contracts in December for the prediction markets platform backed by CME Group and FanDuel.
Two months later it added Kalshi’s prediction markets to its US futures business, clearing those trades directly as well.
Kalshi Chief Executive Tarek Mansour said Plus500 “was the natural choice to support our expansion into perpetual futures.”
Non-OTC products, which include its US futures business, still made up about 16% of revenue in the first nine months, Plus500 said in its third-quarter update on Monday.
The rest still comes from contracts for difference, a business whose quarterly volumes FM Intelligence tracks across 186 retail brokers.
Plus500 is also building a US super-app for the first quarter of 2027 and buying a US broker, Hedge Capital Markets, pending approval from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
CME Is Challenging the Approval
The product still faces a legal fight. CME is suing the CFTC in federal court over the May approval of Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual, arguing the contract is a swap and should be regulated as one.
Kalshi has meanwhile kept adding contracts. It opened a perpetual on a US large-cap stock index on October 6, and its market page showed $556,000 in 24-hour volume and $219,600 in open interest that evening.
This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.
