Kalshi's perpetual futures product launched on June 3rd, with BTCPERP becoming the first perpetual contract approved by the CFTC for traders from the US. Ether launched on June 4th, XRP on June 10th, and now the list covers 13 crypto assets. This week, on August 12th, daily open interest for perpetual futures closed at $17.98 million, a historic high for a product that didn't exist three months ago.
Source: Artemis
Open interest was under $5 million during the first week of June, with two peaks reaching $13 and $14 million mid-month, then dropped to the $6-7 million range where it stayed until the end of June. The following month, specifically in the second week of July, there was a jump as daily bars closed above $10 million, holding in the $12-14 million range for the last three weeks.
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A single large option on the new platform typically indicates several large positions that could have been closed over a few days. However, the chart doesn't show this. The lower bound of the range continues to rise, meaning traders are holding risk on a platform that just ten weeks ago only offered short-term binary contracts.
There is certainly demand for Kalshi's services, and another telling sign is sales volume. The notional value of Kalshi's services surpassed $1 billion within a week of launch. Compared to contracts on the events the platform built its reputation on, it took 40 months to reach that figure.
$17.98 Million Next to $11.7 Billion
Despite Kalshi Perps' impressive performance since launch, it's important to keep perspective. According to DefiLlama, Hyperliquid's 24-hour open interest is $11.7 billion with a daily trading volume of $7.17 billion. Kalshi's entire Perps portfolio is roughly 0.15% of that amount. Individual large players on Hyperliquid have positions exceeding Kalshi's total open interest across all its crypto markets combined.
The difference isn't just size. CoinGecko states Hyperliquid offers 377 perpetual trading pairs. Its HIP-3 segment, covering non-crypto markets created by a single developer, has over $4 billion in open interest. This is just one segment of one developer's markets and is more than 200 times larger than Kalshi's total markets.
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Kalshi's small contract list is for structural reasons. Every contract it lists must be vetted by a federal regulator before a single trade can be made. Hyperliquid deploys markets permissionlessly, so it can support 377 pairs and add new ones at a user's whim.
This is also a fair assessment of the $17.98 million figure. This number isn't low due to lack of demand. It's low because there's almost nothing to trade, and what there is took months of work with regulators to get on the exchange. Concentrating this much open interest on so few contracts is a very different signal than spreading it across hundreds.
In any case, the comparison everyone makes is wrong. Kalshi isn't taking flow from Hyperliquid. It's taking flow from US traders who previously had no legal venue at all to use crypto leverage, and who were either offshore, using a VPN, or just sitting on the sidelines. This pool is separate, and no one knows how large it is.
A period of stagnant or falling prices through the end of August could disrupt this trend. So far, the chart hasn't shown it.
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