Prediction market platform Polymarket officially announced its entry into indefinite futures (“perps”) trading business, further expanding its financial derivatives territory. The move follows reports that its main rival, Kalshi, a regulated U.S. prediction market platform, plans to launch cryptocurrency trading products including open-ended contracts. The so-called indefinite futures refer to futures contracts with no fixed expiry date. As long as the account margin is sufficient, investors can hold leveraged positions for a long time and close out the position at any time.
Polymarket has not made it clear whether its indefinite-term product will cover cryptocurrencies, but the platform has always been crypto-friendly. The company is built on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, and transactions are primarily denominated in the stablecoin USDC. Polymarket’s rapid growth in 2024 is largely driven by crypto traders. If their indefinite contracts are eventually included in crypto varieties, Polymarket and Kalshi will more directly compete in terms of functionality with platforms such as Robinhood, Coinbase and Kraken, which have successively added prediction market services in the past year, to further compete for young retail users who prefer high-risk speculation.
Availability of such international open-ended contract products remains limited within the United States, but in the early days of the crypto industry they were extremely popular among global crypto traders as a tool to circumvent traditional financial restrictions. Competition for open-ended contracts among crypto exchanges has intensified in the past year: About a year ago, Coinbase acquired crypto derivatives exchange Deribit for $2.9 billion, the largest merger and acquisition in the crypto industry to date, giving Coinbase the ability to challenge giants such as Binance head-on in the international derivatives market. According to CoinGecko data, the annual trading volume of indefinite contracts on the world’s top centralized crypto exchanges will reach US$86.2 trillion in 2025, a year-on-year increase of approximately 47%.
Compared with spot trading, indefinite contracts can still bring considerable and sustained trading volume to the platform when currency prices are trading sideways or even when overall trading is weak. At a time when cryptocurrency prices are generally stagnating and market transactions are cooling down, Polymarket and Kalshi have chosen to enter the indefinite contract track, which is seen as an attempt to open up new growth points when crypto market sentiment is depressed. For traders, indefinite contracts can not only be used to amplify speculation on short-term price fluctuations, but can also be used to hedge existing positions and deploy in both long and short directions through the flexible use of leverage. There is room for operation regardless of whether the market is rising or falling.
Industry insiders pointed out that although indefinite contracts have advantages in improving liquidity and enriching trading strategies, their high leverage characteristics also mean higher risks and put forward more stringent requirements for margin management and risk control capabilities. At present, Polymarket has not made further comments on the new business, and Kalshi directly declined to comment.