Kalshi has filed for federal approval to offer perpetual futures tied to equity indexes, the prediction-market platform announced on Tuesday.

Pending approval from its federal regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, traders on Kalshi will be able to take leveraged long or short positions on stock indexes. The company also announced Tuesday that it filed with the CFTC to offer perpetual futures on the price of copper.

Perpetual futures, or "perps," are a multi-trillion dollar asset class on offshore cryptocurrency exchanges, but they were only approved for trading in the U.S. by the CFTC in May. Traders bet against one another on whether the price of an underlying asset will go up or down: If the price goes up, the trader on the short side pays the long side; if it goes down, the long side pays the short side. Perp traders can apply leverage to their positions-as high as 50-to-1 on some offshore exchanges. Kalshi offers up to 6-to-1 on certain assets.

Kalshi isn't launching perpetual futures tied to single stocks "at this time," according to a company spokesperson, who noted that single-security options are jointly regulated by the CFTC and Securities Exchange Commission. Polymarket, Kalshi's closest competitor in the prediction-market space, offers single-stock perps on its international platform.

Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of Barron's.

It seems inevitable that Kalshi will eventually file for approval of single-security perps. The firm has already signaled an ambition to list prediction markets on whether a stock will go up or down within a 15-minute window. In an interview with Barron's discussing 15-minute markets, Kalshi's head of product Catherine Sullivan said that "given the ultimate vision is to allow users to trade anything they want in any time frame they want, [single-stock 15-minute markets] would fall into the natural strategy. It's just a question of will we be allowed to list it or not."

Like the name suggests, perpetual futures have no set expiration date and trade 24/7. While the products have up until recently been limited to prices of cryptocurrencies, the expansion to stock indexes heralds a new era of nonstop trading. If a late-Sunday-night news event looks set to disrupt markets Monday morning, traders can take perpetual futures positions to hedge their exposure.

While some of that trading activity was already possible with traditional futures and options contracts, Kalshi believes that perps are a cleaner way to trade-no complicated terminology or advanced training necessary, just a belief on whether a price will go up or down.

However, the differences between traditional and upstart markets was undercut slightly Tuesday when Nasdaq confirmed it will begin 23-hour-a-day trading on weekdays starting Dec. 6.

Today's announcement is just the latest indication of Kalshi's ambitions to grow beyond the event contracts that buoyed its prediction-market business to a private valuation of $22 billion.

Last week, Barron's reported that Kalshi is rehiring Jeff Bandman and putting him in charge of its futures commission merchant, which will run perpetual futures operations. Bandman was a key figure in Kalshi's earliest days, securing CFTC-approval for event contracts. His return shows how much emphasis Kalshi is putting on perpetual futures, which CEO Tarek Mansour has positioned as central to the firm's "next chapter."