Kalshi Files for US Stock Perps With 15.50% Margin Floor

Kalshi's proposed US stock perpetual futures would require customers to post at least 15.50% of a position's current market value as margin, according to the exchange's proposed rule change published by the SEC. That single number tells you more about the product than the headlines do: at the floor, it caps leverage at roughly 6.5 times, and it sits just above the 15% minimum that already applies to unhedged security futures positions.

What Kalshi filed, with which regulator, and on what date

Kalshi submitted a proposed rule change to the Securities and Exchange Commission and sent the same proposal to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for approval under Section 5c(c) of the Commodity Exchange Act on September 18, 2026, according to the SEC release carrying the filing. Cointelegraph, which reported the filing on Friday, described the contracts as having no preset expiration date and using periodic funding payments between longs and shorts to keep prices aligned with the underlying stocks, cleared through Kalshi's CFTC-registered clearinghouse, Kalshi Klear.

There is a scope discrepancy worth naming. The seed coverage frames this as a filing on individual US stocks. Crypto.news, which examined the CFTC's public records, reported separate Kalshi submissions for AAPL, TSLA, MSFT, NVDA, AMZN and also the SPY and QQQ exchange-traded funds, meaning ETFs are in scope alongside single names. Crypto Briefing put the coverage at up to 58 large-cap stocks and ETFs with market capitalisations above $100 billion; that count comes from Crypto Briefing's reading of the filing rather than from a figure we verified in the SEC document itself, so treat it as reported rather than confirmed.

Kalshi is not alone. Cointelegraph reported that Coinbase submitted its own proposal for stock perpetuals the same day, and that Payward, Kraken's parent, filed through its Bitnomial Exchange, initially targeting perpetual futures on 10 US equities including Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, with 24/5 trading as the goal. Stocktwits reported that Coinbase Derivatives had already filed a Form 1-N with the SEC on September 1 to register as a national securities exchange, with Coinbase Financial Markets filing a Form BD-N as a security futures broker-dealer the same day — a reminder that these products need two regulators, not one.

The proposed terms in numbers

How to read these figures, and what they do not establish

A perpetual future is a contract with no settlement date. Instead of expiring, it uses a recurring funding payment between the two sides of the trade to pull the contract price back toward the spot price of the asset. Kalshi's rule text, as reported by crypto.news, sets that mechanism's boundaries: a 0.002% deadband so tiny price gaps do not trigger payments, and a 2.00% cap on the size of a funding payment. For a trader, funding is a running cost or credit, not a fee schedule you can ignore — it is the price of holding a position that never expires.

The 15.50% margin floor divides into a maximum of about 6.5 times leverage at the moment a position is opened. That is our arithmetic, not a figure in the filing, and it is a floor, not a promise: brokers can demand more, and the requirement is stated as a percentage of current market value, so the dollar amount moves with the stock. Crypto Briefing reached a similar reading, calling it roughly 6x at the margin floor.

Several things remain genuinely unknown. None of the filings establish fees, funding intervals in practice, position limits, or how a never-expiring equity contract handles stock splits, dividends, mergers and trading halts when the reference market is shut. Cash settlement means no shares change hands, so holders get no ownership or dividend rights. And a filing is not a launch: the exchanges' own descriptions are proposals, and no customer can trade any of this today.

The approval path and the litigation hanging over it

Crypto.news reported that each of Kalshi's equity perpetual submissions still showed "Approval Pending (45)" status in CFTC records when checked on September 20, and that the SEC had not posted a fixed comment deadline, with comments due 21 days after Federal Register publication. The November 2 date in the filing is conditional on that process — it reads as "or such later date" as CFTC rules permit, not as a launch announcement.

The wider legal question is unresolved. CoinDesk reported on September 3 that the CFTC asked a federal judge to dismiss CME Group's lawsuit challenging its approval of crypto perpetual futures, calling the dispute "much ado about nothing" and arguing CME lacks standing because it has not alleged concrete financial loss; CME's position is that perpetual futures meet the statutory definition of swaps. A motion to dismiss is not a ruling, and dismissal on standing would not decide the swaps question on the merits. Kalshi's equity filing leans on the same framework the CFTC used for its Bitcoin perpetual, which the SEC release notes the CFTC approved in May 2026 — so how that case resolves matters for the product category, not just for one exchange.

Dated items to watch

• 21 days after Federal Register publication: SEC public comments on Kalshi's proposed rule change are due, per crypto.news; no fixed date had been posted as of September 20.
• November 2, 2026: the earliest effective date stated in Kalshi's own filing, conditional on CFTC approval.
• CME Group v. CFTC: the court has yet to rule on the CFTC's motion to dismiss, filed in early September according to CoinDesk.