Key Points:
- Prediction platforms Kalshi and Polymarket plan to offer perpetual futures to American cryptocurrency traders.
- Perpetual futures accounted for 70% of centralized crypto trading volume, hitting a massive $61.7 trillion in 2025.
- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission plans to bring these high-leverage derivative contracts onshore with proper safeguards.
- Financial analysts believe this defensive move will put prediction markets in direct competition with giants like Robinhood and Coinbase.
A massive land grab is happening right now in the United States financial sector. Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket want to secure a piece of the perpetual futures market. These high-risk products already dominate the global cryptocurrency trading world. Now, these prediction platforms want to bring them directly to American users and expand their business models.
Cryptocurrency traders simply call these contracts perps. They are futures contracts that never expire and allow users to trade with up to 100x leverage. Because of strict regulations, these risky products were virtually nonexistent in the United States before President Trump took office. This regulatory gap previously allowed offshore exchanges like Binance and the collapsed FTX platform to dominate the global market for years.
Today, perps account for more than 70% of trading volume on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. Data from CryptoQuant shows that perpetual futures trading volume reached a staggering $61.7 trillion in 2025. This represents a 29% jump from 2024. For comparison, regular spot crypto trading volume only reached $18.6 trillion in 2025, representing just a 9% increase.
Combining prediction markets with high-leverage trading could completely change how Americans gamble on real-world events. This move will pit Kalshi and Polymarket against established financial giants like Robinhood and Coinbase in a fierce battle. Skeptics worry that mixing event betting with heavy leverage will create wild price swings and tie the volatile crypto market closer to everyday finance.
However, financial analysts do not view this as a major threat to the major cryptocurrency platforms. Owen Lau works as an analyst at Clear Street. He views the move as a simple product expansion for the people who already use Polymarket and Kalshi. Lau believes it will be very difficult to convince current Coinbase, Binance, or Robinhood users to leave their familiar trading apps.
Dan Dolev from Mizuho considers the strategy a defensive play. He thinks the prediction markets simply want to protect their own businesses rather than steal customers from others. Dolev expects Robinhood to eventually build its own prediction-market tools from scratch to keep its users within its ecosystem.
Robinhood already relies heavily on this new space. The company launched its Prediction Markets hub last year through a special deal with Kalshi. This hub quickly became the fastest-growing product line by revenue in Robinhood’s history. Customers traded over 11 billion contracts, and more than 1 million users joined the action in 2025. Coinbase followed suit and started its own partnership with Kalshi this January.
Dolev noted a massive overlap between people who bet on predictions and people who trade cryptocurrency. He called the prediction market sector a clear home run for Robinhood. Meanwhile, Crypto.com, Coinbase, and Robinhood all joined the new Coalition for Prediction Markets lobby group to shape future laws. Dolev warned that current prediction market companies will eventually face serious disruption from these massive brokers.
Bringing these risky trades to America requires major rule changes. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced earlier this year that it wants to bring true perpetual derivatives onshore. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig blamed the previous administration for failing to create a legal path for these markets. Selig promised to use his power to help these products grow safely in America, with the right guardrails in place.
Trading perps carries massive risks. Lau explained that foreign exchanges use auto-deleveraging systems. These systems automatically wipe out traders when bets go bad. This causes a chain reaction of liquidations that crashes cryptocurrency prices in a single day. American regulators previously blocked perps to prevent these exact market crashes from harming retail investors.
Prediction markets also face heavy scrutiny right now. Authorities accuse some bettors of using secret insider information to win bets on private events. Others allegedly tampered with real-world weather sensors to rig the outcomes of climate bets. Adding highly leveraged cryptocurrency contracts to this environment will definitely invite stricter government oversight before these companies can scale up their operations.
If Polymarket and Kalshi succeed, the entire stock market might change. Lau suggested that perpetual futures could eventually expand beyond digital coins. If regulators stop the dangerous auto-deleveraging process, traders might soon use perps to bet on the S&P 500, oil, coffee, or Apple stock.
