Polymarket has officially expanded beyond prediction markets with the launch of Polymarket Perps, offering perpetual futures contracts with up to 20x leverage across 67 live markets. The no-expiration contracts allow long and short positions on bitcoin, ether, solana, gold, oil, the Nasdaq 100, the S&P 500-tracking USA500 index, and individual equities such as Nvidia, Tesla, Coinbase and Strategy. The lineup includes 24 crypto contracts, 36 equity-linked markets, three indices and four commodities. Leverage is capped at 20x for crypto, the S&P 500, oil, gold and silver, and at 10x for other listed assets.
Fees start at 0.04% taker and 0.0125% maker at standard volume, stepping down to 0.02% taker and a 0.005% maker rebate for accounts trading more than $1 billion over a rolling 30-day period. The product is not available to users in the United States, Canada and several sanctioned jurisdictions; U.S. traders are directed to Polymarket’s CFTC-regulated affiliate, polymarket.us.
The launch comes two days after Polymarket closed a funding round valuing the company above $21 billion, and after Intercontinental Exchange, parent of the New York Stock Exchange, committed a combined $2.6 billion since October, making it Polymarket’s largest shareholder at roughly 22%. That backing followed Polymarket’s return to the U.S. market through its $112 million acquisition of QCEX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, three years after a CFTC enforcement action forced the platform to block American users and pay a $1.4 million fine.
Separately, Kraken parent Payward has filed to launch CFTC-regulated perpetual futures for eligible U.S. traders through Bitnomial, the Designated Contract Market acquired by the company. The proposed products would cover BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, and ADA perpetual derivatives. Trading is not live yet; the launch remains subject to a 30-day regulatory self-certification review process. Bitnomial’s status as a CFTC-registered DCM gives Payward a regulated venue framework for derivatives listings, potentially widening U.S. access to leveraged altcoin exposure and increasing competition with offshore derivatives markets.
