Kalshi’s perpetual futures product went live on June 3 with BTCPERP becoming the first perp contract cleared by the CFTC for US traders. Ether went live on June 4, XRP on June 10 and the roster now covers 13 crypto assets. This week, on August 12, daily perpetual futures open interest closed at $17.98 million, an all time high for a product that wasn’t around even three months ago.
Source: Artemis
Open interest was under $5 million through the first week of June with two spikes toward $13 and $14 million mid month, then fell back into a $6 million to $7 million range where it remained for the rest of June. The next month, more specifically the second week of July, was when the floor moved with daily bars closing above $10 million and the last three weeks held between $12 million and $14 million.
The Floor Rising Matters More Than the Record
A single high print on a new platform usually indicates a couple of large positions that could’ve unwound within days. However, that is not what the chart shows. The bottom of the range keeps rising, which means traders are carrying risk on a platform that ten weeks ago listed nothing but short-dated binary event contracts.
The demand is certainly there for Kalshi perps and another telling sign of this is through volume. Kalshi’s perps crossed $1 billion in notional within a week of launch. Now in comparison to the platform’s event contracts, the business it built its name on, this took 40 months to hit that number.
$17.98 million next to $11.7 billion
Despite Kalshi’s Perps doing impressive numbers since launch, it’s still important to put it into some sort of perspective. Hyperliquid’s 24-hour open interest sits at $11.7 billion, per DefiLlama, on $7.17 billion of daily volume. Kalshi’s entire perp book is running at roughly 0.15% of that. Individual whales on Hyperliquid carry positions larger than everything Kalshi has open across all its crypto markets combined.
The gap is not just in size. CoinGecko states that Hyperliquid lists 377 perpetual pairs. Its HIP-3 segment, which covers non-crypto markets deployed by a single builder, sits above $4 billion in open interest on its own. That is one sleeve of one deployer’s markets, and it is more than 200 times Kalshi’s total.
Every New Market on Kalshi Starts with a Filing
Kalshi’s roster is small for a structural reason. Every contract it lists has to pass a federal regulator before a single trade prints. Hyperliquid deploys markets permissionlessly, which is why it can carry 377 pairs and add more whenever a deployer wants one.
That is also the honest read on the $17.98 million. The number is not small because demand is thin. It is small because there is almost nothing to trade and what exists took months of regulatory work to get listed. Concentrating that much open interest across so few contracts is a different signal than spreading it across hundreds.
The comparison people keep reaching for is the wrong one anyway. Kalshi is not taking flow from Hyperliquid. It is taking flow from US traders who previously had no compliant venue for leveraged crypto exposure at all and who were either offshore, on a VPN, or sitting out. That pool is separate, and nobody knows how deep it goes.
What breaks the trend is a stretch of flat or falling prints through late August. So far the chart has not given one.
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