Polymarket Launches Crypto Perpetual Futures With Up to 20x Leverage
Polymarket launched “Perps,” a perpetual futures product that expands its prediction-market platform into leveraged trading on crypto, commodities, stock indexes, and some individual stocks. The initial rollout included 10 markets and quickly expanded to 67. Unlike Polymarket’s usual yes-or-no contracts, perps track an asset’s price continuously, use hourly funding payments to stay near spot, and support leverage up to 20x for major assets and 10x for equities. The launch does not include U.S. users; they are routed to Polymarket US, a separate CFTC-regulated exchange created after Polymarket’s earlier regulatory settlement. In the U.S. market, Kalshi reached perpetual futures first, and Hyperliquid remains the main competitive threat in on-chain perps trading, with possible future access to U.S. traders.
