Polymarket Launches Perpetual Futures With Up to 20x Leverage Across Crypto, Stocks, Commodities

Polymarket has launched Polymarket Perps, adding perpetual futures contracts with up to 20x leverage across 67 live markets spanning cryptocurrencies, individual equities, indices and commodities. The contracts carry no expiration date and let traders take long or short positions on assets including bitcoin, ether, solana, gold, oil, the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500-tracking USA500 index, and individual stocks such as Nvidia, Tesla, Coinbase and Strategy.

The lineup covers 24 crypto contracts, 36 equity-linked markets, three indices and four commodities, according to Polymarket. Leverage is capped at 20x for crypto, the S&P 500, oil, gold and silver, and at 10x for other listed assets. Trading fees start at 0.04% taker and 0.0125% maker at standard volume, stepping down to 0.02% taker with a 0.005% maker rebate for accounts trading more than $1 billion over a rolling 30-day period. Perps trading is unavailable to users in the United States, Canada and several sanctioned jurisdictions; U.S. traders are directed instead to Polymarket's CFTC-regulated affiliate, polymarket.us.

The launch lands two days after Polymarket closed a funding round valuing the company above $21 billion, and after Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, committed a combined $2.6 billion to the platform since October, making it Polymarket's largest shareholder at roughly 22%. That institutional backing followed Polymarket's return to the U.S. market this year, made possible by its $112 million acquisition of QCEX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, three years after a CFTC enforcement action forced the platform to block American users and pay a $1.4 million fine.

Perps is a structural expansion rather than a new betting category. Polymarket built its user base on binary, resolution-based contracts tied to discrete events, elections, Fed decisions and similar one-time outcomes that settle once and close. Leveraged perpetuals on continuously priced assets like bitcoin or the S&P 500 are a different product, closer to what crypto-native derivatives venues such as Hyperliquid already offer. Running both models on the same order book and balance sheet is now Polymarket's bet, that the liquidity and infrastructure it built for prediction markets can be redirected toward general-purpose leveraged trading without the two products working against each other's risk.

Whether that bet pays off depends on liquidity depth once the leverage segment scales past its early volume, still in the low single-digit millions of dollars on its largest live contracts, and on whether regulators in jurisdictions Polymarket has not already excluded treat leveraged perpetuals on individual equities differently than they treat election contracts. For now, Perps gives Polymarket a second product line built directly on the compliance and clearing infrastructure it spent $112 million acquiring, launched at the moment its own valuation suggests investors are already pricing in more than a prediction market.