Kalshi Perpetual Futures (Perpetuals), explained — long & short, leverage, funding, and liquidation

Perps are unique in three ways:

Two-way trading: you can trade on whether the price will go up or down. Stocks only make money if the price goes up.

No expiration: predictions and options have a strict end date. Perps never expire — you can hold a position for five minutes or five months and cash out whenever you want.

Leverage: you control a larger position than the cash you put in, which amplifies both your gains and your losses.

Perps track Bitcoin's price but trade on their own. To stop the perp price from drifting too far from the actual spot-market price, platforms use a mechanism called the funding rate. Kalshi rebalances the prices three times a day.

Think of it as a balancing fee between buyers (longs) and sellers (shorts) that updates every 8 hours. If longs dominate, the perp price gets too high, so buyers pay a fee to sellers to bring it back down. If shorts dominate, the perp price gets too low, so sellers pay a fee to buyers to push it back up.

You can see the real-time funding rate directly on each product page — for example, if the BTC funding rate currently shows 0%, no one is paying anyone. Funding fees are strictly capped at 2% of your position per 8-hour window.

When you open a trade with leverage, your initial capital acts as a safety cushion. If the market moves against you, that cushion starts to shrink — and if the price drops too far and it hits zero, the system automatically closes your position to keep you from going into debt. That's liquidation.

The golden rule of leverage: more leverage means a thinner cushion, and less room for your trade to survive normal market swings. At 5× leverage, a Bitcoin drop of around 7% could wipe out your cushion and liquidate you.

What to do about it: set a stop-loss when you open your trade, so you decide the price where it closes instead of leaving it up to liquidation.

Auto-liquidation mechanisms are designed to limit losses by closing positions when margin thresholds are breached, but they do not function as a guaranteed stop-loss. Rapid or extreme market movements, including gaps in price or periods of illiquidity, may result in execution at prices significantly worse than the liquidation trigger, potentially producing a negative account balance.

Minimums tend to be low and depend on the asset. Each Perpetual sets its own minimum size, but generally you can get started for as little as $1.

Yes. Kalshi's Perpetuals are CFTC-approved perpetual futures. Kalshi is the first company in US history to offer regulated perpetual futures to American traders.