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Prediction market platform Polymarket is expanding into trading perpetual futures contacts, the company announced Tuesday.
The announcement followed an Information report that main rival Kalsi plans to offer crypto trading, including perpetual trading. These are futures contracts that are open indefinitely, allowing traders to hold leveraged exposure and exit the trade at any time, as long as they have sufficient funds to maintain it.
Polymarket has not disclosed whether its products include crypto perpetual futures, but the company is very crypto-friendly. It is built on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains and primarily refers to transactions in the stablecoin USDC. Cryptocurrency traders were the main driving force behind Polymarket’s meteoric rise in 2024.
This move will expose Kalsi, and perhaps Polymarket if its offering includes permanent storage of cryptocurrencies, to more direct competition. robin hood, coinbase and Kraken have both added prediction markets to their offerings in the past year, highlighting their value to young, speculative, risk-tolerant retail traders.
Although not widely available in the United States, International Perpetuals, or “purps”, were particularly popular among cryptocurrency enthusiasts in the industry’s early days as a workaround to traditional financial limitations. According to CoinGecko, the top centralized crypto exchanges recorded annual PERP trading volume of $86.2 trillion last year, a 47% year-over-year growth.
By expanding into PERP, Polymarket and Calci are entering derivatives trading at a time when crypto prices are stalling and trading activity is slowing, even if signs of long-term institutional demand remain intact.
Perp has the ability to generate more stable trading volumes regardless of market direction and keep the ecosystem active by allowing traders to speculate on short-term movements, hedge existing positions, and utilize leverage.
Neither Calci nor Polymarket responded to requests for comment.
—CNBC’s Liz Napolitano contributed reporting.
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalsi have a commercial relationship that includes a minority investment in CNBC.
