Kalshi launches gold and silver perpetual futures with CFTC approval

Kalshi launches gold and silver perpetual futures with CFTC approval

Thu, September 10, 2026 at 8:54 PM GMT+3 2 min read

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Kalshi launched perpetual futures contracts tied to gold and silver on Thursday, after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved the listing, marking the first non-crypto perpetual futures contracts to receive regulatory clearance in the U.S.

The CFTC approved the contracts this week, following a filing Kalshi had originally submitted in July, according to CNBC.

Perpetual futures — commonly called perps — are a type of futures contract that never expire and carry no requirement for the trader to possess the underlying asset. Price alignment with the spot market is maintained through a built-in funding mechanism. Kalshi said the structure offers advantages over existing options for precious metals exposure, including traditional futures with rollover fees, ETFs with management fees, and physical metal that carries storage and transport costs.

Udesh Jha, who serves as chief risk officer at Kalshi's clearing house, Kalshi Klear, described metals as a natural next step given investor demand for commodity exposure. "Metals, especially gold and silver, have a story to tell because of inflation," Jha told CNBC.

That demand has shown up in Kalshi's commodity-related event contracts, which crossed $400 million in trading volume in seven months, the company said — a milestone its crypto event contracts needed twice as long to achieve, according to CNBC.

Kalshi became the first company to offer regulated domestic perpetual futures when the CFTC approved its bitcoin perpetual contract in late May. The company noted that perps recorded more than $90 trillion in global trading volume in 2025, a market previously accessible to U.S. traders only through unregulated offshore venues. Since their launch, Kalshi's crypto perps have done $44 billion in notional volume, the company said.

Kalshi has since pushed to expand the product line into additional asset classes. The company filed with the CFTC in August to list perpetual futures tied to U.S. equity indexes, copper, and currencies. Those filings remain pending.

The gold and silver launch follows the broader industry disruption that began with the original crypto perps approval. CME Group and CBOE Global Markets saw their stocks fall after the CFTC first greenlighted domestic perps, with investors worried the new product would cut into established futures exchange business. CME Group took the dispute to court, filing a lawsuit against the CFTC over its decision to permit the contracts, according to CNBC. Jha attributed Kalshi's early perps success to its regulated structure. "Unregulated platforms, they have always hit a ceiling," he told CNBC.