Polymarket launched perpetual futures trading on September 3, posting "Polymarket Perps is live" on X. The platform opened with 67 contracts covering crypto assets, stocks, commodities, and indices, with leverage reaching 20x. The product is available on Polymarket's international site, which blocks users in the United States, Canada, and several sanctioned jurisdictions.
Polymarket Perps is live.
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) September 3, 2026
Up to 20x leverage on crypto, stocks, commodities, & more. Deepest liquidity, lowest fees.
Long BTC, predict the Fed, short the S&P reaction — only on Polymarket.com
👉 https://t.co/UwdkHrmEMT pic.twitter.com/hwOULeRjIH
On launch day, Ether led all contracts with $9 million in volume, followed by Bitcoin at $7 million and gold at $5 million. Ondo placed fourth at $4 million. Combined volume across all 67 markets reached roughly $73 million on day one. For context, Hyperliquid processed $7.04 billion in perpetual futures volume in a single 24-hour period and $209.81 billion over 30 days, according to DefiLlama. Polymarket's entire perps book on its first day represents approximately 1% of one day of Hyperliquid's output.
Polymarket's documentation sets taker fees at 0.04% and maker fees at 0.0125% at the entry tier, stepping down to 0.02% for takers and a 0.005% maker rebate above $1 billion in trailing 30-day volume.
The 67 contracts at launch split into 36 stocks, 24 crypto assets, four commodities, and three indices. Beyond Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid's HYPE token, the list includes SpaceX shares through an SPCX contract, Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix, a DRAM contract, Brent and WTI crude, the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, gold, silver, and Fartcoin.
Why US traders cannot access the product and what that means for Polymarket
The restriction on American users traces directly to a January 2022 CFTC order against Blockratize, Polymarket's operating entity. The regulator found that the company had offered event-based binary options without registering as a designated contract market or swap execution facility and fined it $1.4 million. Under that settlement, Polymarket had to wind down non-compliant markets and prevent US customers from accessing its international platform.
Polymarket has since received approval to operate a US designated contract market and opened general access to its American platform in May 2026. That domestic venue operates under CFTC oversight but remains separate from the international perps interface. American users cannot access the leveraged perpetuals product.
Kalshi shipped its own perpetuals on May 29, three months before Polymarket's launch, describing them as the first CFTC-regulated perps available to US traders. Kalshi's funding cycle runs every eight hours. Polymarket's hourly funding is the tighter of the two.
Polymarket's broader position heading into the perps launch
Polymarket's total value locked stood at $344.73 million with $460.59 million in open interest and $3.79 billion in 30-day volume at launch, according to DefiLlama. That 30-day figure is down from $4.29 billion in June. Kalshi's tracked 30-day volume reached $11.10 billion, roughly three times Polymarket's. The two platforms together accounted for 93% of prediction market volume in August as two smaller competitors shut down.
Polymarket has raised $2 billion in total funding, including a $2 billion investment from Intercontinental Exchange in October 2025 and a further $600 million from the same backer in March 2026. ICE operates the New York Stock Exchange and several futures exchanges, making its investment in Polymarket one of the most significant bets a traditional exchange operator has placed on the prediction market model. That relationship gives Polymarket access to institutional market structure expertise that most crypto-native platforms lack, though it has not yet translated into a dominant volume position against Hyperliquid.
Josh Stevens, Polymarket's vice president of engineering for DeFi, described the perps backend as written from scratch in Rust. He separately said the company is targeting a replacement of its main exchange order book in Q4, benchmarking at 200,000 orders per second. The existing system he described as "full of tech debt."
In August, Polymarket revised settlement for short-duration crypto event contracts after researchers identified 821 accounts with $8.2 million in profits from settlement periods classified as likely manipulated. The platform adopted time-weighted prices using Chainlink Data Streams, with 30-second averages for five-minute contracts and 60-second averages for longer windows.
Gunel Ismayilova
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