Polymarket perps move comes as crypto trading increasingly leans on perpetual futures, a market that exceeded $86 trillion in annual volume in 2025.
A prediction market platform known for letting users bet on real-world events is now stepping into one of crypto’s most aggressive trading arenas.
Polymarket said in an X post on Tuesday, April 21, it will start offering perpetual futures, also known as perps, a type of contract that lets traders hold leveraged positions without an expiry date.
Perps are a core product in crypto trading. They allow users to bet on price moves with borrowed money and close positions anytime.
- On something like Polymarket perps, a user could in theory put in $1,000 in USDC▼$0.9998 and open a 10x position on an event-linked market.
- That would give them about $10,000 in exposure, so a 5% move in their favor would mean roughly $500 in profit, while a move of around 10% the other way would wipe out the full $1,000 and liquidate the position.
- As of press time, it’s still unclear how exactly Polymarket’s perps would work and what exactly they would track.
- It’s also not clear yet whether they would price crypto or lean into real-world events, as the platform has only teased early access with a short video showing trades tied to equities.
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Race Into Derivatives
The move lands just as Kalshi, one of the few federally regulated prediction platforms in the U.S., is also reportedly exploring crypto trading products, including perpetual futures.
That shift is pulling both prediction markets closer and closer to crypto trading heavyweights like Coinbase and Kraken, which have all rolled out prediction-style features over the past year.
And the reason for that mania is because perpetual futures are quite huge. In 2025 alone, crypto exchanges processed over $86 trillion in perps volume, up roughly 47% from the year before, according to data from CoinGecko.
On most major exchanges, perps now account for well over half of total trading activity, and on some days they reach 70% to 80% of daily volume.
Read more: Polymarket in Talks to Raise $400 Million
