Kalshi Has Filed for Perpetual Futures on Currencies and Interest Rates, Andy Ross Says

Kalshi has asked regulators to let it list perpetual futures on foreign exchange and interest rates, Andy Ross, the exchange’s head of institutional, said on Monday’s episode of Bits + Bips.

“We put in today to do some FX and rates perpetuals as well,” Ross said on the show, speaking the same day the submission was made. The filing had not appeared on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s public docket as of Tuesday afternoon. Kalshi’s earlier perpetual submissions took several days to post.

That would take a contract type the exchange could not legally offer in the United States four months ago into currencies and rates, both far larger underlying markets than crypto.

The perpetual, a futures contract with no expiry that trades close to spot through a periodic funding payment, was for years a crypto-native instrument available onshore to almost nobody. The CFTC approved Kalshi’s bitcoin contract in late May, making it the first regulated domestic perpetual in the country. Ether and XRP followed within days.

The expansion since has been steady and it has moved away from crypto. Kalshi filed in July for perpetuals on gold, silver and platinum. On August 18 it submitted US500, a perpetual on the MerQube US Large Cap Index, a 500-name float-weighted benchmark of big US-listed companies. It filed for a copper contract the same day.

Ross said the gold contract is close. “We’re about to launch a series of markets like on gold, so we’re gonna have a gold perpetual,” he said.

Adding currencies and rates would leave few major asset classes outside the product. Ross framed that as the point.

“We’ve got fixed income, we’ve got rates, we’ve got tokens, and they all fit in a user interface that retail can get involved in the order book directly through our platform, but also institutional can via their FCMs,” he said.

The objection to perpetuals is that offshore venues pair them with leverage retail traders do not survive. Ross’s answer was that the regulatory perimeter is the constraint.

“Because they sit inside a regulated perimeter, we don’t offer huge amounts of leverage,” he said. Traders can dial their own leverage below that ceiling, he said, with the cap depending on how volatile the underlying is.

He made the same argument about prediction markets generally, drawing a line between venues that run know-your-customer checks and those that do not. “There’s a huge difference between an onshore prediction market and an offshore prediction market,” he said.

Ross also pointed to a calibration study Kalshi published on its research site, which he said covered 2.2 million data points and tested whether the exchange’s market prices matched real-world outcomes.

“They pretty much sit along that straight line,” he said of the results. The part he flagged was where they still hold. “They sit along that straight line one week out, and they sit along that straight line when maybe only $50,000, $60,000 is traded on that market. So you don’t need institutional size to have a really well-calibrated market.”

That is the claim doing the work in Kalshi’s regulatory argument. A thin market that still prices accurately is easier to defend as price discovery than as gambling, and it is the ground the exchange has been fighting on in its disputes with state regulators.

Ross said the exchange has grown from about 4,000 markets to 10,000 since he joined six or seven months ago, and that activity has spread across them rather than pooling in a handful. “We don’t just need to have everybody correlated around the very biggest, most liquid points,” he said of the spread of activity.

Whether the FX and rates contracts arrive depends on which route Kalshi took. Its US500 submission went in under Commission Regulation 40.3(a), a voluntary request for review and approval, which waits on the agency. Self-certification, the faster path, lets a contract list without pre-clearance. The filing itself will show which one, once it posts.

Listen to the full episode of Bits + Bips.

Related Listen: Why the Kalshi-Nevada Ruling Could Land at the Supreme Court

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