Finally, Polymarket teams up with Kalshi to take a slice of this cake.

Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

The derivatives market is once again welcoming a disruptor.

Yesterday, the prediction market giant Polymarket announced it will soon launch perpetual futures trading, allowing users to trade the prices of various assets with at least 10x leverage, including real-world assets like gold and silver, stocks of companies like Nvidia and Coinbase, and digital assets such as Bitcoin.

A few days ago, The Information reported that another leading prediction market project, Kalshi, plans to support perpetual futures on its platform, enabling U.S. customers to trade derivatives contracts without expiration dates and to use so-called funding rates for around-the-clock trading.

The prediction market duopoly has announced expansion into perpetual contract products in the short term, which not only broadens their product and revenue boundaries to support ongoing growth in financing and valuation but also responds to potential threats from some cross-industry competitors.

1. Highly Overlapping User Profiles

Prediction markets and perpetual contracts share highly similar user demographics: both attract high-risk-tolerant, macro-sensitive speculators, and both carry significant risks of users losing their investments in a short period.

In fact, a large portion of trading volume in prediction markets comes directly from forecasts of cryptocurrency prices. When users predict on Polymarket whether Bitcoin will break $90k by the end of the month, their underlying motivation is essentially no different from opening a long position in a contract market. By integrating perpetual contracts, prediction platforms can fully explore monetization opportunities within their existing user base.

Moreover, as a true aggregation of user sentiment and opinions, prediction results have already become an important reference for many users when trading cryptocurrencies. From viewing forecast data to executing contract trades, this is increasingly becoming a routine trading pathway for these users.

For platforms, this is not just an addition of features but the completion of a trading cycle: while observing macro events (such as Federal Reserve rate decisions or geopolitical conflicts) and participating in predictions, users can directly hedge or amplify gains on related assets (like gold or U.S. stocks) using leverage, minimizing traffic loss.

Additionally, this functional overlay can elevate the “low-frequency, big-event-driven” mode of prediction markets to a “high-frequency, around-the-clock” derivatives trading dimension, thoroughly locking in user attention.

2. The Trillion-Dollar Market Attraction

The direct driving force attracting prediction market platforms into the fray is the enormous capital volume of the derivatives market.

Although prediction markets have experienced explosive growth since 2025—according to Dune data, their total monthly trading volume has exceeded $20 billion, with daily averages surpassing $700 million this year.

However, in comparison, the scale of the perpetual contracts market is on a completely different level. Top decentralized perpetual platforms (like Hyperliquid, dYdX) typically maintain daily trading volumes in the tens of billions of dollars, while centralized exchanges (CEXs) see daily perpetual trading volumes in the hundreds of billions.

This potential business prospect is irresistible for high-valuation pursuits like Polymarket and Kalshi. In the context of prediction markets potentially experiencing traffic declines after cyclical events (such as elections), perpetual contracts—characterized by high frequency, essential need, and long-term viability—will become the core pillar supporting their valuation growth.

Moreover, the actions of Polymarket and Kalshi are not blind experiments but backed by solid compliance frameworks.

Kalshi, as a designated contract market (DCM) regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has a natural advantage in offering futures and options trading within a compliant framework. This means it can legally provide “long-term contracts” to U.S. retail and institutional investors within a regulated scope. Polymarket US was also designated as a DCM by the CFTC in July 2025.

3. Expanding Trading Scenarios Becomes the Mainstream Trend

To some extent, the moves by these prediction markets are also a response to the threat posed by derivatives giants like Hyperliquid.

In February this year, Hyperliquid explicitly announced on X that it plans to support outcome trading, a feature that will allow users to create prediction markets and similar options tools directly on its platform. As a leading on-chain perpetual platform, Hyperliquid aims to cover more trading scenarios by integrating prediction functionalities.

Now, Polymarket and Kalshi’s reverse entry into perpetual contracts is essentially a countermeasure: when competitors try to encroach on your territory, the most direct defense is to enter their core domain.

More broadly, this shift points to a clearer industry trend—platforms are all vying for “closed-loop trading.”

In recent years, more and more exchanges have integrated prediction market features, aiming to keep users’ “information trading needs” within their own ecosystems; now, prediction markets are inversely integrating perpetual contracts to cover users’ “price trading needs.”

Whether centralized exchanges, decentralized derivatives platforms, or prediction markets, they are all evolving in the same direction: from single-product providers to comprehensive trading platforms covering multiple assets, tools, and scenarios.

Ultimately, the core variable behind this convergence remains revenue and valuation. When growth and competitive pressures intensify, moving toward diversified scenarios like derivatives becomes an almost inevitable choice for all trading platforms.