Polymarket built its name on simple bets: will a candidate win, will a central bank cut, will a film top the box office. Each contract paid out a dollar or nothing. Last week the company stepped into a very different business, and one where the downside is not capped at the price of a ticket.

On 3 September Polymarket launched Perps, a perpetual futures exchange that lets users go long or short on bitcoin, ether, solana, gold, silver, WTI crude, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100, with leverage of up to 20 times. The product opened with ten markets and, according to the company's own listings, had expanded to 67 within hours. The roster now includes 36 individual US stocks such as Tesla, Nvidia, Apple and Coinbase, plus a contract called SPCX that tracks the implied value of SpaceX shares without conferring any ownership.

Financial news site 24/7 Wall St, which first drew attention to the launch, puts the size of the market Polymarket has walked into at roughly $90 trillion. Whatever the precise figure, perpetual futures are the dominant way crypto traders take leveraged positions, and volumes on the largest venues run into the trillions of dollars each month.

How a perp differs from a prediction contract

A conventional Polymarket contract resolves once. A perpetual future never does. It tracks the price of its underlying asset continuously, and a funding rate, recalculated every hour, moves small payments between long and short holders to keep the contract anchored to the spot price. Polymarket caps that rate at 4% per hour in either direction.

The consequence is that a perp position behaves like owning, or short-selling, the asset itself, multiplied by whatever leverage the trader selects. That is where the risk concentrates.

Why 5% is the number that matters

At 20x leverage a trader posts 5% of a position's value as initial margin. Polymarket's documentation sets the maintenance margin, the minimum collateral needed to keep the position open, at half of that: 2.5% of the notional value on every 20x market, regardless of position size.

The arithmetic is unforgiving:

  • A 2.5% move against the position eats half the posted margin and triggers liquidation.
  • A 5% move against the position wipes out the entire stake.
  • If the price gaps far enough that the order book cannot absorb the sale, the position is transferred to Polymarket's insurance fund and the trader's remaining collateral goes with it.

Liquidation orders are executed as market orders that sweep whatever liquidity is resting on the book. There is no protective buffer. For an asset like bitcoin, which routinely moves 5% in a day, a fully leveraged position can be opened and destroyed inside a single session.

Individual stocks and other real-world assets are capped at 10x, which doubles the cushion to a 10% move. That is still less than many large-cap stocks swing on an earnings day.

Who can trade it

Perps are available to eligible international users only. Traders in the United States are routed to Polymarket US, a separate exchange regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the perpetual futures product is not offered there. That split dates back to the company's 2022 settlement with the CFTC, which required it to wind down unregistered contracts for American customers.

The launch also lands in a market that is already stretching its hours. Nasdaq has set out plans for near round-the-clock equity trading, retail options volume is at record levels, and combined activity on Polymarket and rival Kalshi has climbed from under $5 billion a month in late 2025 to tens of billions in the busiest months of this year.

A venue built for asking who wins the election is now quoting gold and the S&P 500 with leverage, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The bigger question

Prediction markets have argued for years that they are information tools rather than casinos. Perpetual futures, with hourly funding and automatic liquidation, are harder to frame that way. They are the same instrument that has produced most of the largest single-day retail losses in crypto over the past cycle.

Polymarket's bet is that the audience it has assembled around elections, sport and culture will follow it into leveraged trading. The bet its users are being offered is narrower: that they can be right about direction, and right about timing, before a 5% move decides the matter for them.

This report draws on Polymarket's published product documentation and reporting by 24/7 Wall St and Decrypt.