Polymarket opened its Perps product on September 3, launching with 10 markets that expanded to 67 within hours. The leveraged derivatives platform offers up to 20x leverage but blocks U.S. traders, who are routed instead to a separate CFTC-regulated exchange.
Polymarket, the prediction market platform that rose to fame during the 2024 presidential election, opened its perpetual futures product to traders on September 3. The offering, called Perps, launched with an initial 10 markets—Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, HYPE, gold, silver, WTI oil, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 and a contract tracking SpaceX shares. Within hours, that list expanded to 67 markets.
Leverage caps and liquidation math
A perp tracks its underlying asset's price continuously with no expiration date, unlike Polymarket's usual yes-or-no contracts. Polymarket's documentation caps crypto, the S&P 500, oil, gold and silver at 20x, while individual stocks and other real-world assets—Tesla, Nvidia, Apple and Coinbase among 36 listed equities—max out at 10x. Maintenance margin sits at half the maximum leverage rate, so a fully leveraged 20x position can be liquidated after losing roughly 2.5% of its posted margin.
Its funding rate moves payments between long and short traders every hour to keep the contract anchored to spot, and that rate is capped at 4% per hour in either direction. Polymarket promoted the launch on X, pitching a compound trade that combines a long Bitcoin position, a bet on the Fed's next move and a short on the S&P 500's reaction, all from one account. The company also billed the product as carrying the deepest liquidity and lowest fees among crypto perps venues.
Barred from the US
None of it reaches Polymarket's American users. The company's own FAQ bars order placement from the United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.
Instead, U.S. traders get routed to Polymarket US, a separate CFTC-regulated exchange. That split followed Polymarket's 2022 settlement with the CFTC, which fined the company $1.4 million and ordered it to wind down noncompliant contracts after finding it had run an unregistered swaps facility.
Kalshi beat Polymarket to the U.S. market by more than three months. The CFTC approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual futures contract on May 29, letting the rival prediction market call it the first onshore perpetual futures product in the country.
Since then, Kalshi has filed for perpetuals on a dozen altcoins and a separate copper contract. Hyperliquid, the decentralized exchange that already dominates on-chain perpetuals trading, is a bigger competitive test still to come.
Source: Decrypt
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