The prediction-market operator is preparing to seek CFTC approval for a perpetual WTI crude contract, extending a crypto-style trading structure into commodities.
Bloomberg reported that Kalshi is preparing to file with the CFTC for approval of a never-expiring, or perpetual, WTI crude oil futures contract, intended to trade continuously rather than on the batch-expiration schedule of traditional futures. The filing was reported to be imminent as of early September. Accounts differ on whether trading would run continuously or five days a week; that detail has not been settled.
The move would extend a strategy Kalshi has already been running in crypto. The company moved into perpetual futures trading on crypto assets earlier this year, and a WTI contract would be its first extension of that structure into a traditional commodity market.
Perpetual futures, contracts with no fixed expiration date that instead use a periodic funding-rate mechanism to keep their price tethered to the underlying asset, are a structure borrowed directly from crypto exchanges, where they have become the dominant way traders speculate on digital-asset prices. Applying that same mechanism to oil would put Kalshi in more direct competition with the CME's own WTI futures franchise, one of the most heavily traded commodity contracts in the world, using a product structure the CME does not currently offer.
Whether the CFTC approves it is a separate question from whether traders want it. Kalshi's own crypto perpetuals have found an audience; oil traders accustomed to the CME's deep, centrally cleared futures market may be a harder sell. But a formal CFTC filing, if it proceeds as reported, would be Kalshi's clearest signal yet that it sees its future less as a prediction-market niche and more as a full derivatives platform competing directly with incumbents like the CME.