Kalshi Names Former CFTC Official Jeff Bandman CEO of Kalshi Prime

Kalshi has appointed Jeff Bandman, a former senior official at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as chief executive of Kalshi Prime, the company’s CFTC-registered futures commission merchant. The appointment, announced August 12, 2026, puts Bandman in charge of the entity that serves customers of Kalshi’s margined perpetual futures business.

Bandman is not a new arrival. He led Kalshi’s regulatory strategy from its earliest days and helped secure the company’s 2020 designation as a CFTC-regulated exchange, according to the announcement. He returns to Kalshi from 6529 Holdings and 6529 Capital, an institutional alternative asset manager for digital assets, where he served as chief operating officer and general counsel.

At the CFTC, Bandman led the Division of Clearing and Risk and the Office of International Affairs, initiated the agency’s digital asset work, led the design and launch of LabCFTC, and negotiated a clearinghouse equivalence arrangement with the European Commission.

Why the FCM Seat Matters at Kalshi

Kalshi Prime is the futures commission merchant arm of the business. In the US derivatives market, an FCM is the registered intermediary that holds customer money and positions and routes trades to the exchange. Kalshi launched the unit in June 2026 to pave the way for margin-backed perpetual futures, the product line that has become the company’s most significant expansion since event contracts.

Perpetuals are futures contracts that track whether the price of an asset rises or falls, without the fixed expiration date of a standard contract. Kalshi’s announcement describes them as the company’s biggest product move since it introduced event contracts and frames the FCM as the vehicle for building “the FCM of the future,” combining risk management and customer service with access to hedging tools for retail and institutional customers.

“Jeff believed in Kalshi when most people thought it could never be regulated,” said Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi. “He helped us turn that idea into a CFTC-designated exchange. There is no one better to lead the FCM that will power Kalshi’s next chapter.”

The Perpetuals Push Behind the Hire

Bandman’s appointment lands two months into Kalshi Prime’s existence and less than three months after Kalshi won the first US approval for a perpetual futures contract. On May 29, 2026, the CFTC issued an order approving Kalshi’s BTCPERP contract, a perpetual referencing the spot price of bitcoin, for listing as a futures contract on Kalshi’s designated contract market. Kalshi had submitted the contract for review a day earlier, on May 28, 2026.

The same day, Kalshi announced the launch of perpetual futures, making it the first company in the US to offer the product. The scale of the offshore market explains the urgency: perpetuals have grown from $28 trillion in annual volume in 2023 to more than $90 trillion in 2025, a market that had been entirely closed to American institutions until the approval. Kalshi said it aims to launch crypto perpetuals on more than a dozen currencies, pending regulatory reviews, and that funding rates on the contracts reset every eight hours.

The product line sits inside a wider competitive race among US prediction-market and event-contract operators, one that has drawn in established gambling and trading groups. Gaming.net has tracked that build-out, from Kalshi’s multi-year market-surveillance deal with Nasdaq earlier this month to IG Group’s $1.3 billion move for Underdog, a sign of how valuable the regulated US pipeline has become.

Bandman’s History With the Company

The appointment completes a circle for Bandman and for Kalshi’s founders. Co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara called more than sixty lawyers who told them a regulated event-contracts exchange was impossible before they found Bandman, according to the announcement. Spearheaded by Bandman, the company spent four years pursuing its regulatory status with the CFTC, secured federal regulation in 2020, and launched trading in 2021.

That regulatory-first posture has defined Kalshi’s approach since, and it has been tested repeatedly as the company pushed into sports event contracts and, now, perpetuals. State regulators have challenged its model in several jurisdictions, with Gaming.net reporting on Nevada’s move to force Kalshi to geofence its sports markets and a Washington judge’s finding that Kalshi is likely an illegal gambling site in separate recent disputes. The perpetuals expansion shifts part of that fight back to the federal derivatives framework where Bandman built his career.

Bandman holds an undergraduate degree from Yale, magna cum laude with honors in History and English, and a law degree from Stanford Law School. The announcement also notes he is a six-time Jeopardy! champion.

His task now is to stand up a customer-facing FCM for a product class the CFTC itself has flagged as not necessarily suited to every asset class, in a market where the regulator has said it expects participants to submit further perpetual contracts for review. With Kalshi Prime two months old and the BTCPERP approval in hand, Bandman takes over the entity through which Kalshi intends to carry that expansion.