Polymarket Launches Perps With 20x Leverage

Polymarket opened perpetual futures trading to the public on Thursday, adding leveraged contracts with no expiry on Tesla, Bitcoin and gold to a platform built on event markets.

The product puts Polymarket in competition with Hyperliquid and the offshore derivatives venues. It launched on the international site Americans are barred from, three months after Kalshi began offering perps to U.S. traders under CFTC oversight.

Sixty-Seven Live Markets

"Polymarket Perps is live," the company posted on X at 11:12 a.m. ET. "Up to 20x leverage on crypto, stocks, commodities, & more. Deepest liquidity, lowest fees."

The perps page carried 67 contracts as of 4:25 p.m. ET, split into 36 stocks, 24 crypto assets, four commodities and three indices. Perps now sits in the top navigation bar next to Trending and Politics.

Ether led on volume at $9 million, followed by Bitcoin at $7 million and gold at $5 million. Ondo was fourth at $4 million, ahead of every other token including Solana, which showed $607,000. The site displays these figures without stating a time window. Added together, the 67 markets come to roughly $73 million.

The list runs well past crypto majors. It includes SpaceX and Samsung share contracts, Micron and SK Hynix, a DRAM contract, Brent and WTI crude, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, and Fartcoin.

Checking The Fee Claim

Polymarket's fee schedule starts at 0.04% for takers and 0.0125% for makers, according to its documentation, and steps down by trailing 30-day volume to 0.02% and a 0.005% maker rebate above $1 billion.

Hyperliquid's published schedule starts at 0.045% and 0.015% and bottoms at 0.024% for takers above $7 billion in 14-day volume. Polymarket's entry tier is cheaper than Hyperliquid's on both sides, and its top tier is the only one of the two that pays makers.

Funding settles hourly, capped at 4% per hour in either direction, with a premium index sampled from the order book every five seconds. Maintenance margin is 0.5 divided by maximum leverage, or 2.5% on a 20x market. Below two-thirds of maintenance margin, an insurance fund absorbs the position.

No Americans, No Canadians

"Order placement is not permitted from the United States, Canada, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea, Donetsk, or Luhansk," the documentation says.

That restriction traces to the CFTC's January 2022 order against Blockratize, Polymarket's operating entity, which fined the company $1.4 million for running an unregistered trading facility and required it to wind down non-compliant markets. Polymarket has since asked the regulator to let American traders back onto the onchain venue.

Polymarket's own documentation still describes perps as being "in early access" requiring "a valid Perps referral link or code," language the company has not updated since Thursday's announcement.

Kalshi Launched in May

Both companies announced perps within a day of each other in April. Kalshi shipped first, launching on May 29 with contracts it called the first perpetuals offered in the United States, regulated by the CFTC and funded on an eight-hour cycle. Polymarket's hourly funding is the tighter of the two.

A Rust Backend Under It

Josh Stevens, Polymarket's vice president of engineering for DeFi, described the perps product in April as new contracts on a backend written from scratch in Rust. On Monday he said the company is applying the same approach to its main exchange, calling the existing central limit order book "full of tech debt" and targeting a Q4 replacement benchmarking at 200,000 orders per second. Neither Polymarket's main account nor its developer account had posted about that rewrite as of Thursday.

Volume Has Been Falling

Polymarket has $344.73 million in total value locked and did $3.79 billion in volume over the past 30 days, according to DefiLlama, against $460.59 million in open interest. Fees over the period were $65.05 million, of which $15.53 million was revenue.

That is down from the $4.29 billion the platform cleared in June, and Kalshi has widened its lead each month since. Kalshi's tracked 30-day volume is $11.10 billion, roughly three times Polymarket's. The two together took 93% of prediction market volume in August as two smaller competitors shut down.

Hyperliquid, the venue Polymarket is now quoting against, did $7.04 billion in perp volume in the past 24 hours and $209.81 billion over 30 days, per DefiLlama. Polymarket's entire perps book on day one is about 1% of one day of Hyperliquid's.

Polymarket has no token. It has raised $2.88 billion, including a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange in October 2025 and $600 million from the same backer in March.