Kalshi Adds Gold and Silver Perpetual Futures With Round-the-Clock Trading

Kalshi launched 24/7 perpetual futures on gold and silver on 2026年9月10日, adding precious-metal contracts to its existing crypto perpetuals lineup. In its launch announcement, the company said the contracts are the first of their kind in America and fully regulated by the CFTC.

The contracts are live on Kalshi’s perpetual futures page, which notes that Kalshi is subject to US regulatory oversight by the CFTC. Gold carries maximum leverage of 15.2× and silver 7.7×, according to the exchange’s product documentation, which cautions that leverage values reflect current API data and may change without notice. Minimum position sizes can start as low as $1.

How the Contracts Work

Perpetual futures let traders take a position on whether an asset’s price will rise or fall without buying or holding the underlying asset. Unlike prediction markets, the contracts have no end date, and a position can be closed whenever the holder chooses.

Because the contracts never expire, a funding rate anchors the contract price to the asset’s real-time spot price, performing the role expiration dates play for traditional futures. The rate is a small recurring payment that moves directly between traders on opposite sides of the contract; the platform does not collect it. When the contract price sits above spot, traders in up positions pay traders in down positions, and when it sits below, the payments reverse.

The rate is built from a steady baseline interest component set by the platform and a variable premium that grows or shrinks with the gap between the contract price and spot. Funding settles every eight hours for crypto contracts, at 12:00 AM, 8:00 AM, and 4:00 PM ET, and once a day at 10:00 AM ET for precious metals. Funding never pauses for crypto and gold, while silver funding pauses on weekends and holidays. Funding fees are capped at 2% of a position per window.

Margin is the deposit posted to open a position and sits in the account as collateral, not a loan or a fee. Initial margin is what a trader posts to open the position, while maintenance margin, typically around 90% of initial margin, is the floor the account can fall to before a margin call is triggered. If mark-to-market losses push the balance below maintenance margin, the account must be topped back up to the full initial margin requirement.

If losses erode that cash cushion, Kalshi closes the position automatically, a forced closure called liquidation. The documentation states that liquidation limits further losses but does not function as a guaranteed stop-loss, and that rapid or extreme market movements can produce execution at prices significantly worse than the trigger, potentially leaving a negative account balance. Take-profit and stop-loss orders, which close a position automatically at prices the trader sets in advance, are available as exit tools.

Kalshi pays 3.25% annual interest on cash held in a perpetuals margin account, whether it is backing an open position or sitting idle. Interest is calculated daily and paid monthly, requires an average daily balance of at least $250, and is currently available to eligible customers in the United States and its territories, with the rate and eligibility subject to change. The company said most perpetuals platforms pay nothing on customer cash.

Kalshi’s Stated Rationale

In the launch post, Kalshi said the first commodity futures were built to solve a specific problem: farmers did not want the risk of prices changing over the harvest season, so they created agreements to exchange grain at set prices on specific future dates, and futures contracts have carried expiration dates ever since. The company argued that a structure designed for physical deliveries of wheat and corn does not fit modern futures trading, which it said now includes metals, Bitcoin, and fiat currencies.

The company listed what it described as flaws in existing ways of gaining precious-metals exposure: traditional futures carry costly rollover fees, exchange-traded funds are indirect, charge management fees, and provide no leverage, and physical metal is costly to store, transport, and sell. Kalshi said perpetuals avoid those downsides because they concentrate liquidity in a single contract, trade around the clock, and do not charge monthly fees.

Kalshi said offshore perpetuals accounted for $90 trillion in trading volume in 2025. “It’s time Americans got access to perpetuals, too,” the company wrote, adding that news does not stop on weekends while markets do.

Access and Existing Lineup

Gold and silver join a perpetuals lineup that already lists crypto assets including Bitcoin at 6.0× maximum leverage, BNB at 4.7×, Ethereum at 4.6×, Litecoin at 3.8×, Chainlink at 3.5×, and Solana at 3.0×, among others. Kalshi describes itself as the first CFTC-regulated platform in the US to offer perpetual futures.

A comparison table in the product documentation sets perpetual futures against quarterly futures. Perpetuals carry no expiry, no settlement, a funding-rate price anchor, and no rollover, while quarterly futures expire every quarter, settle in cash at expiry, are anchored by arbitrage at expiry, and must be rolled each quarter to maintain exposure. The documentation notes that rollover carries a cost tied to the basis, the difference between the spot and futures price, which can be positive or negative depending on market conditions.

Perpetuals trading is not automatically available to all Kalshi users. According to the company’s help center, every user must apply for a margin account, and the perpetuals margin account is separate from a user’s Kalshi predictions balance. The help center’s perpetual futures collection runs to 16 articles covering margin, funding, order types, take-profit and stop-loss orders, liquidation, and moving money between accounts.