A filing covering Tesla, Apple and Nvidia among others would move the event-contract exchange into dual-regulated single-security derivatives, and it needs both the SEC and the CFTC to agree.
Kalshi filed on for 60 perpetual futures contracts on individual stocks and exchange-traded funds, including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia.
This is a different business from the one Kalshi has been fighting about in court. Event contracts are binary outcomes on real-world questions. Perpetual futures on a single security are leveraged derivatives on an equity price, and they sit in the one regulatory category American markets have handled most awkwardly, because futures on individual securities are jointly regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
That joint jurisdiction is the central obstacle. Approval requires both agencies, and the last serious attempt at building a single-stock futures market in the United States never achieved scale, in part because the dual-regulatory structure made it expensive to operate.
The reported terms
Eligibility is reported to be limited to companies with a market capitalization of at least $100 billion. Leverage of up to 15 times has been cited by reference to the gold and silver perpetual contracts Kalshi has already launched. Kalshi has not published either figure itself, and both are subject to whatever the two agencies make of the filing.
The litigation it lands into
Kalshi is already the subject of an active fight over the boundaries of its category. It has a pending en banc petition in the Ninth Circuit, and Robinhood and the state of New Jersey have separate certiorari petitions before the Supreme Court, all arising from the question of whether its sports-related event contracts are federally regulated derivatives or state-regulated gambling.
Separately, CME Group sued the CFTC in June over the agency's approval of Kalshi's crypto perpetual contracts, arguing they should be classified as swaps. The CFTC has characterized that suit as frivolous.
Filing for 60 single-stock perpetuals while that suit is pending and while its core product line is before the Supreme Court is an aggressive sequencing choice.
What it signals about the business
Event contracts on elections and sports are seasonal and headline-driven. Leveraged perpetuals on liquid megacap equities are not: they generate volume every trading day, from a different customer, at a different size.
The filing is therefore best read as a diversification away from a revenue base that depends on election cycles and football seasons, into a product that competes directly with the leveraged offerings of established derivatives exchanges. That is also why CME's existing objection is unlikely to be its last.