Kalshi Inc. is filing for regulatory approval to offer the first single-stock perpetual futures in the U.S. and is looking to expand the contracts in commodities to include agriculture, said Tarek Mansour, the company’s co-founder.

The move represents one of the most ambitious attempts by a new breed of trading platforms to challenge the established infrastructure of traditional financial markets.

The New York-based company will file as soon as next week for regulatory approval to list contracts linked to some of the biggest U.S. stocks, including Tesla Inc., Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp., said Mansour, who is also Kalshi’s CEO. The company will ask the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission to jointly regulate the never-expiring futures as a security futures product.

“It’s about time that these products come to the U.S., under a regulated umbrella with the right set of guardrails and customer protection,” Mansour said in an interview.

A representative for the SEC declined to comment. A CFTC spokesperson didn’t reply to requests for comment.

Perpetual futures, or “perps,” are a kind of leveraged contract that allows traders to speculate on the price of assets without an expiration date. The contracts have become increasingly popular, particularly for betting on cryptocurrency and commodity prices, but U.S. regulators and financial industry leaders have raised concerns about their built-in leverage, which allows customers to amplify the risk they take with each trade.

Mansour argued that Kalshi’s perpetual products have limited leverage that is in line with other regulated contracts, including futures. Perpetual futures are a “cheaper, more cost-effective way to get the exact same exposure” to stocks as a futures contract, with the same or less leverage but no funding costs, Mansour said. “We are not extending more leverage.”

Kalshi is starting with equity-linked perps for stocks that have market capitalizations of at least $100 billion and $450 million in average daily volume, said Mansour. It plans to add exchange-traded funds down the line, he added.

The company is looking beyond equities, adding perps tied to commodities, including agriculture products, Mansour said. “The approach for those will be to engage with the community and constituencies first before launching those products,” he said.

A person familiar with the matter also told Bloomberg earlier this month that Kalshi will seek approval to offer an oil linked perpetual futures contract tied to the West Texas Intermediate benchmark.

Unlike crypto-linked perpetuals which trade 24/7, Kalshi’s single-stock contracts would initially trade 23 hours a day, five days a week, in line with the schedule that was approved for traditional U.S. exchanges, Mansour said. Each contract will represent 100 shares and have a minimum margin that’s calculated at 15% of the stock’s current market value.

Perps were for a time largely confined to crypto markets, but have become more mainstream during the Iran war, when they became one of the only ways for retail investors to trade oil while traditional futures exchanges were closed.

Kalshi was one of the first venues to seek approval from U.S. regulators to list perps, starting with crypto-linked perpetual futures. A crypto-friendly regime under President Donald Trump has helped ease the company’s path. In May, the CFTC gave Kalshi approval to list Bitcoin perps and extended that to gold, silver and platinum this week.

Until the CFTC began approving the contracts, perps were mainly available on offshore exchanges, outside the reach of U.S. regulators and oversight.

The CFTC’s approval of the never-expiring contracts has irked exchange operator CME Group Inc. The company’s CEO Terry Duffy has said the products are not “appropriate” for institutional players looking to manage their risk.

CME also alleged in a June lawsuit that the CFTC and its Chairman Michael Selig overrode congressional direction and “circumvented the regulatory regime” required for approving perps as a futures product, a more favorable designation that gets better tax treatment than a swap.

Swaps also face more stringent regulation than futures, a consequence of post-financial crisis reforms when complex financial swaps played a role in the mortgage-market meltdown. The CME said in the lawsuit that the CFTC’s actions “inflict textbook competitive injury on CME.”

The CFTC earlier this month moved to dismiss the case. A CME representative declined to comment.

(With assistance from Lydia Beyoud.)

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