There’s a land grab underway in the U.S. for perpetual futures, one of the biggest and riskiest parts of the crypto trading world — and prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket reportedly want a piece of it.
Perpetual futures, better known by users as “perps,” are futures contracts without expiration dates that have seen explosive growth since President Trump returned to office. Before that, perps — which can offer up to 100x leverage — didn’t really exist in the U.S., a big reason offshore exchanges like Binance and the now defunct FTX grew so dominant.
Today, perps account for more than 70% of all the volume on centralized crypto exchanges, according to CoinGecko. In 2025, perps trading volume climbed to a nominal $61.7 trillion, a 29% increase from 2024, according to data from CryptoQuant. By comparison, spot crypto trading volume reached a nominal $18.6 trillion in 2025, up 9% from the previous year.
The convergence of prediction markets and leveraged trading could reshape how Americans trade on real-world events. It would also bring prediction markets into direct competition with platforms such as Robinhood and Coinbase, and lead skeptics to question whether combining prediction markets with leveraged products would heighten volatility and more closely link crypto to mainstream finance.
For the incumbent crypto platforms themselves, however, analysts have largely downplayed any potential risks posed by challenges from the predictions markets.
Natural extension
“I don’t see this as an immediate threat,” said Owen Lau, an analyst at Clear Street. “This is a natural product extension for Polymarket and Kalshi’s existing customers .… It’d be hard to ask people from Coinbase or Binance or Robinhood to abandon their existing platform and go to [them].”
Mizuho’s Dan Dolev said the move from prediction markets aims more to guard against risk rather than gain ground.
“Eventually … Robinhood is going to want to do it on their own,” Dolev said. “So it’s a defensive move more than it is an offensive move.”
Robinhood launched its Prediction Markets hub last year through a partnership with Kalshi, and it became the platform’s fastest-ever growing product line by revenue, with 11 billion contracts traded by more than 1 million customers in 2025, according to the company. Coinbase launched its partnership with Kalshi this January.
Dolev said the overlap between the prediction and crypto markets’ user bases is “massive,” making it a “home run idea” for Robinhood to enter. Crypto.com, Coinbase and Robinhood are all members of the newly formed Coalition for Prediction Markets lobby group.
“Prediction market providers eventually will face risk of disruption,” he said.
U.S. push to onshore perps
If perps trading becomes popular in the U.S., it could create more volatility in certain assets, Lau said.
“Because of the leverage, because of the riskiness of this contract, you just never saw any perps contracts in the U.S. before,” he said.
Perps outside the U.S. use something called an auto deleveraging system, meaning exchanges automatically liquidate trader positions, causing big liquidation cascades that trigger big single-day drawdowns in crypto prices. That’s perhaps why U.S. regulators haven’t previously been comfortable allowing the contracts to be traded domestically, Lau added.
The success of the planned expansions will depend largely on how the product is structured — how contracts are priced, settled, margined and incentivized for traders. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, said early this year that it’s working to onshore “true perpetual derivatives.”
“The prior administration failed to create a pathway for these markets to exist onshore,” CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said in prepared remarks at the time. “Under my leadership, the CFTC will use the tools at its disposal to onshore perpetual and other novel derivative products so that they can flourish across both centralized and decentralized markets, subject to appropriate safeguards.”
At the same time, prediction markets are facing increased scrutiny after recent incidents when their bettors allegedly exploited insider information or manipulated underlying data — like traders betting on nonpublic events or being accused of tampering with real-world inputs like weather sensors — to secure outsized profits. Add crypto into the mix, and it’s sure to prompt further scrutiny that hampers the effort before these companies can scale up their involvement.
But, if successful, the big question becomes whether these contracts made popular in crypto will expand to other asset classes. If the CFTC and U.S. operators can continue to prevent the use of auto deleveraging in perps trading, it could be a logical next step, Lau said.
“[Perps] are a crypto thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see if they want to push in that direction after they launch perps on crypto,” he said. “If they bring this concept to the S&P 500, energy, coffee, Apple stock — it will become a more interesting phenomenon.”
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a CNBC minority investment.
