Kalshi Files to Add Perpetual Futures on 12 Altcoins, Three Days After CFTC Cleared Its Bitcoin Contract

Kalshi filed on Monday to add perpetual futures contracts on 12 altcoins, three business days after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved its BTCPERP bitcoin contract as the first US-regulated crypto perpetual.

The submission covers perpetuals on ether, XRP, solana, dogecoin, stellar, chainlink, bitcoin cash, litecoin, sui, shiba inu, polkadot and hedera. The 12 tokens between them account for the bulk of altcoin perpetual open interest on offshore venues. None of the new contracts is approved yet — under the framework the agency laid out alongside BTCPERP, each one must clear case-by-case Commission review before it can trade.

The filing is the first attempt to bring regulated altcoin perpetual futures onshore in the United States. Kalshi (a CFTC-registered Designated Contract Market) said when it launched BTCPERP that it aimed to "launch crypto perpetuals on more than a dozen currencies" pending regulatory review, according to its May 29 announcement. Perpetuals — futures contracts with no expiration that use periodic funding payments to track the underlying spot price — have grown into a roughly $90 trillion annual market overseas, almost entirely on venues like Binance, BitMEX, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid that US institutional desks cannot legally access.

The 12 Tokens

The list maps closely to the top-tier altcoin perpetual book on offshore exchanges and lines up with the assets the CFTC has historically treated as digital commodities rather than securities. It includes ether (the second-largest crypto by market cap), the four mainstays of dollar-denominated speculation — XRP, solana, dogecoin, shiba inu — and a longer tail of L1 and payments tokens: stellar, chainlink, bitcoin cash, litecoin, sui, polkadot and hedera. Conspicuously absent: any token currently under live SEC enforcement, and any agricultural or equity-linked underlying. Kalshi's May 29 release had explicitly ruled out perpetuals on agricultural commodities.

Self-Certification Versus Full Approval

The contracts have been described in early coverage as "self-certified," but the CFTC's own paper trail tells a different procedural story. Kalshi submitted BTCPERP under Commission Regulation 40.3 — the voluntary approval route, where the Commission reviews and approves a contract before listing — not Regulation 40.2 self-certification, which lets trading begin the next business day. In a policy statement issued the same day as the BTCPERP order, the CFTC said the 40.3 case-by-case route is "appropriate for the listing of perpetual contracts that reference asset classes that are not contemplated in the Order." Translation: every one of these 12 altcoin contracts has to be individually cleared by the Commission.

The agency also flagged in its order that "the perpetual contract design may not be suitable for all asset classes," language that telegraphs harder scrutiny for thinner-liquidity tokens.

"This marks Kalshi's evolution from prediction market leader to next-gen derivatives exchange," Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said in the launch release. "Onshore, safe, and regulated perps will improve capital allocation and risk management for countless American businesses."

What This Does to the Onshore Race

The Defiant reported on Friday that the BTCPERP order, combined with a separate CFTC letter allowing Coinbase to route US customers to its Deribit-affiliated offshore book, kicked off the onshore perps race. Coinbase took the foreign-futures pathway. Kalshi is now the only registered DCM that has filed for a regulated, onshore altcoin product slate.

Kraken has said it intends to launch perpetuals through its Bitnomial acquisition within 30 days but has not yet filed altcoin contracts. Polymarket, the other registered DCM in prediction-market crypto, has not announced a perpetuals product.

The piece that's still unsettled is timing. BTCPERP cleared 40.3 review in one day after Kalshi submitted on May 28, but the Commission has not committed to a comparable pace for follow-on altcoin contracts, and at least some of the 12 — the lower-cap, more volatile names — could be sent back for redesign or denied outright. What Kalshi has now is a queue position. What it does not have is a launch date.