Polymarket has launched Polymarket Perps, a crypto perpetual futures product offering international traders up to 20x leverage. The offering scaled from 10 markets to 67. The product expands Polymarket beyond binary event contracts into leveraged derivatives. U.S. users are directed to the separate CFTC-regulated exchange and cannot access the perps. The company framed the launch as narrowing the gap between opinion and tradable position.

Polymarket's two-platform structure forces traders to choose between regulated safety and leveraged scale. U.S. users stay on the CFTC-registered event-contract exchange with no perps access; international users get 20x leverage offshore with no cross-margin between the two pools. This split creates arbitrage gaps that concentrated global bets can exploit against the U.S. book. Kalshi is racing to match product breadth at lower leverage under full CFTC registration. CME already lost one lawsuit against Kalshi's bitcoin perps; a second front on crude oil or equity index perpetuals would test whether courts treat prediction-market leverage as commodity innovation or evasion. The September 4 launch matters because Kalshi filed for oil perpetuals the next day.