Analysis
Kalshi says its single-stock perpetual futures have reached $5 billion in notional volume since they launched on November 5, a company figure relayed by TokenPost on Sunday, November 15, which did not verify it independently. The same day, Bloomberg reported that traders are piling into the contracts on Nvidia and SpaceX: Kalshi offers up to 4.6x leverage on Nvidia positions and 3.5x on Micron and SpaceX, and $100 of cash buys $458.81 of exposure at the top setting.
That is what changed since Pulse covered Kalshi's $1 billion Series G at a $40 billion valuation on October 29. Then, Kalshi was a prediction market raising money on event contracts. Ten days of stock perps have turned it into a leveraged-equity venue that sits in the middle of a legal fight with CME, Cboe and Citadel Securities over what a perp is.
What Kalshi stock perps are
A perpetual future gives exposure to a stock's price without owning the share, and unlike a normal future it never expires. Kalshi's own launch post, dated November 5, says the contracts cover over 50 companies listed on the NYSE and Nasdaq, naming McDonald's, Palantir, SpaceX and Meta, with no expiration and no rollover fees. Co-founder and COO Luana Lopes Lara wrote that users "traded over $300m" on the morning of the stealth launch. Bloomberg notes the trading began the same day tech stocks had their worst selloff since 2020.
“That is what changed since Pulse covered Kalshi's $1 billion Series G at a $40 billion valuation on October 29.”
The single-name numbers Bloomberg reported:
- Nvidia -- Kalshi's Nvidia perps traded over $100 million in 24 hours on a Thursday after CEO Jensen Huang's departure; by comparison about $78 billion of Nvidia shares changed hands on November 9
- Micron -- above $100 million on November 9
- SpaceX -- as much as $88 million in a single day
Those figures are small next to the cash market, though the product is only ten days old.
Who is fighting Kalshi over equity perps
Kalshi self-certified the contracts with the CFTC rather than waiting for a vote. It filed on September 18, and under the CFTC's 45-day rule the window closed on November 2, Ledger Insights reported; CFTC Chairman Michael Selig welcomed the milestone. On November 2, SIFMA asked the SEC and CFTC to block the products, after Cboe, CME Group and Nasdaq sent similar letters in October.
CME CEO Terry Duffy told the Futures Industry Association Expo on November 4 that perps "are not a future" and are "definitely a swap if anything at all," adding that "it's 2007 for retail," per Bloomberg. CME is in a court dispute with the CFTC over that question, and Cboe and Citadel Securities are suing the CFTC, arguing equity perps belong on securities exchanges. Kalshi chief risk officer Udesh Jha said on October 28 that "we are governed by CFTC standards." The irony: CME listed its own single-stock futures in late July with more than six times leverage on 50-plus stocks, including Nvidia, SpaceX and Micron, Bloomberg reported.
Kalshi funding history and valuation
Kalshi is run by CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara. Its Series G announcement says it has over 30 million accounts and more than 75% of prediction market volume, with annualized trading volume above $1 trillion, all company figures.
Value Add VC data
- Dec 2025, Series E -- $1B at $11B, led by Paradigm (Kalshi)
- Oct 2026, Series G -- $1B at $40B post-money, co-led by Wellington and Sequoia (Kalshi)
Any round between these two is not covered here. Series G participants named by Kalshi include Baillie Gifford, Stripes, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, CapitalG, Hudson River Trading and Balyasny Asset Management.
The risk in the $5B number
The $5 billion is Kalshi's own count of notional volume, not revenue or customer cash, and it does not come from Bloomberg's reporting. Notional volume on a 4.6x-levered product overstates the money at stake. The leverage figures also vary by source: TokenPost put the maximum at about 6.45x, while Bloomberg's per-stock caps are 4.6x and 3.5x. Competition is not far behind either: Coinbase Derivatives, Bitnomial and Crypto.com's Nadex filed similar equity perps around the same time, and those filings remain pending, per Ledger Insights. If a court sides with CME and reclassifies perps as swaps, the retail product Kalshi is building could face Dodd-Frank rules that were never written for an app.