Gold and silver are 15 to 20 times the size of the crypto market, and Kalshi listed 24-7 perpetual futures on both the day before this interview.
Perpetual futures built the offshore crypto venues, where a position can be closed out automatically and the exchange writes its own rules. Kalshi is moving the same contract onto a US exchange regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and is preparing a filing to extend it to single stocks including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia.
"So what we want to do is we want to provide a platform where before they become large like crypto did over the last few years, we want to make sure that there is an alternative available in a regulated platform for those."
Jha runs risk for Kalshi and took the job a few months before this interview, after about 16 years at CME Group, where he was a managing director and head of post-trade services.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 8 insights that matter.
👤 Guest: Udesh Jha, Chief Risk Officer at Kalshi, previously Managing Director and Head of Post-Trade Services at CME Group, speaking from London
🎙️ Hosts: Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek, who present Bloomberg Businessweek on Bloomberg Radio
📰 Published: 14 September 2026 on Bloomberg Businessweek
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 12 min
Key Takeaways
Gold and silver were chosen because the asset class is 15 to 20 times the size of crypto, not because prediction markets needed another contract
Kalshi's crypto perpetuals have taken about 45 billion of trades since launch
The selling point is not leverage, it is the removal of the monthly roll cost on a long-held metals position
A dated futures position has to be rolled every month; a perpetual contract never expires
Kalshi is filing "in short order" for perpetual futures on single stocks
The argument is that equity and metals perps are already growing offshore, unregulated
Kalshi says it is the first exchange and clearing house that can run mark-to-market and default management on a Saturday or Sunday
Other venues trade around the clock and leave risk management to weekdays
The leverage on Kalshi's gold contract is around 15 to 20x, which Jha says is no different from CME's
The two filters on any new listing are client demand and whether Kalshi can risk manage the product itself
Sports betting accounts and hedging accounts overlap, but the growth Jha points to is in weather and oil contracts
1. Gold Dwarfs Crypto
Carol Masser opened the hour on Kalshi's plan to seek regulatory approval for the country's first regulated perpetual futures tied to single stocks, a story the show attributed throughout to reporting in the Wall Street Journal. A co-host explained the instrument to the audience before the guest came on: "Yeah, reading this from the Wall Street Journal, the contracts known as perps let traders bet around the clock and pile on leverage that amplifies their potential gains and losses with the lack of expiration date." The show's own reading of the reporting was that Kalshi "plans to launch around 60 perps tied to popular futures. ETFs and single stocks of companies with a market value of at least $100 billion," and that the gold and silver contracts are "said to be fully regulated by the CFTC."
Jha's answer for why metals came next is a size argument. "They are a much bigger asset class than, let's say, crypto, 15 to 20 times the size of crypto," he said
The starting point was the existing book: "I think gold and silver are a very natural extension to our crypto perpetuals, which have gotten to a really good start."
On the volume behind that: "We've had about 45 billion of trades already on them."
The metals contracts launched the day before the interview, and he said Kalshi was seeing encouraging signs in volume and in open interest
On gold itself, the case he made was an inflation one: "Gold, not just a store of value, but in today's day and age, with inflation coming in at rates higher than target for the last few years. I mean, one of the best hedge is to hold gold."
Silver he framed differently, as an industrial story: "And then silver with its story around AI, data centers and so on and so forth."
2. Roll Costs Are the Barrier
Jha's explanation of why anyone would want a perpetual contract rather than a dated future is mechanical rather than directional, and it is the part of the answer he kept returning to.
The contract never expires, so a long-held position is never rolled. "If you want to hold gold and silver for a long period of time, which many want to hold, you don't have to go in and pay roll costs every month," he said
He named three features together: "The contract sizes are small. We trade 24-7, and most importantly, they avoid roll costs."
Liquidity sits in one contract rather than being spread across a term structure, which he gave as a separate benefit from the cost saving
His claim is that these frictions, not the price of the metal, are what kept people out: "And some of these things, the size of the contract, roll, have prevented a very large-scale adoption into this market."
The regulated wrapper is the last item on the list rather than the first: "And that's what we are bringing in, in addition to the regulated framework that Kalshi provides."
The framing he used for the whole product is access: "But what we are doing is we are bringing that market broadly to the reach of folks who could not have afforded this type of trade."
3. Who the Contracts Are For
Asked directly who the product is aimed at, inside the Kalshi user base and outside it, Jha declined to pick one.
"This product is built both for the institutions as well as the retail masses," he said
The retail number he gave is a scale claim: "As you are aware, we have several million Kalshi traders, and many of them, because of the nature of this contract, because of the size, because of the benefit of not being rolled, have now access as opposed to going in and trading through intermediate brokers on dated futures, which are a lot more expensive and in many forms, either through roll costs or access."
The comparison he is drawing is against the existing route into metals futures — a broker and a dated contract — rather than against a gold exchange-traded fund or physical metal
4. What Gets Listed Next
Masser asked what is guiding Kalshi's product decisions as the company moves further into conventional finance. Jha gave two filters, and the second is the one the segment came back to later.
The first is demand, split by use: "One, obviously, is client demand, in terms of is this product good for hedging? Is this product good for speculative needs? Is this something that our constituents are demanding?"
The second is self-imposed: "Second, very important, is we also bring products that we feel we can risk manage."
He tied that to the plumbing Kalshi built: "That's why Kalshi has built one of the cutting-edge clearing and exchange systems, where we are able to risk manage every second, we are able to default manage 24-7, and we are able to put in limits and so on and so forth to be able to trap the risk that gets into our system on a much more enhanced basis."
5. Single Stocks Are Filing
Tim Stenevek put the Wall Street Journal's single-stock reporting to Jha and asked him to comment on it.
Jha confirmed the filing is imminent: "We are in the process of filing in short order. So I think I can definitely say that we are quite interested."
The product case is the one he had already made for metals: "Small, reasonable sizes, no roll costs, centralized liquidity in one contract, not around a term structure, and a regulated platform."
The strategic case is pre-emption. "And we have seen some of these equities as well as metals and other perpetuals grow significantly in offshore unregulated channels," he said, arguing Kalshi should list a regulated alternative before those markets get as large as offshore crypto did
6. Not the Offshore Version
A host raised Hyperliquid and the interest around offshore venues, and asked whether Kalshi's product is the same thing and whether it leans retail. Jha used the question to draw a distinction he said most people cannot draw for themselves.
"One thing I do want to point about is that when we talk about perpetuals, it is very hard to distinguish for the common person what a regulated perpetual is and what a perpetual that they hear," he said
The offshore behavior he named is automatic liquidation: "Oftentimes, the word perpetual that we offer gets confused with what's happened offshore, where trades can get auto-liquidated."
He listed three further gaps: "There is very limited risk protection. The amount of money that the entity puts into to protect the trades is less. There is a very different form of surveillance."
The protection he says is the real difference is regulatory rather than technical: "All of those things is very important to highlight that the perpetuals that we offer come with a lot of that protection and not just that, the CFTC's customer protection on the collateral that's held is a significant value add for our products."
On the retail-versus-institutional split, his answer was again both: "On our platform, we do have institutions of various sizes, and of course, we have a lot of retail."
7. Leverage Isn't the Issue
A host pressed on the leverage the contracts allow, noting that leverage can get institutions and individuals into trouble. Jha's reply was that the leverage level is unremarkable and the weekend coverage is what is new.
"And all futures are levered," he said, and gave the comparison directly: "Our leverage levels, for example, for gold, around 15 to 20x is no different than what is at a CME level."
He reframed the question: "So from that standpoint, it is not about offering leverage, it's about how do you risk manage leverage, which is a very good question that you have."
The controls he described are continuous rather than end-of-day — looking into every portfolio to see the risk at that moment and the potential future risk on it
The specific claim he made is a first: "And we are the first exchange slash clearing house which is able to run what's called mark-to-market cycles on a Saturday or a Sunday and run default management on a Saturday or Sunday."
The gap he says that closes: "unlike many other platforms where there is trading that's happening 24-7. However, the risk management is left to the weekdays."
He said Kalshi has demonstrated it can work a distressed counterparty's book on a weekend, rather than describing it as a capability on paper
8. Sports Bettors Overlap
A host put Kalshi's identity to him last, noting that the same site that carries these contracts was taking wagers on a US Open semifinal that afternoon, and asked whether the accounts are the same people.
"I think it's a mix," Jha said, and pointed the growth elsewhere: "I think there are accounts that would look at those, but we have increasingly seen the growth in what I would call our traditional or institutional products, whether it be somebody using our weather contracts to hedge their risks, somebody using our crude oil or oil contracts to hedge a risk."
His argument for prediction markets as risk management is about precision, not size: "Traditionally, in other exchanges, you have large contracts which trade a lot, but they carry on or they accumulate a lot of risk, but they are not perfect hedges."
The example he gave of a bespoke contract is a shipping count — "We have a contract that identifies exactly how many ships are going to go through," he said
"That's why prediction markets are, in my view, growing because they provide that complementary risk management set of tools that are not necessarily available in the traditional products that trade," he said
Bonus Insights
The hosts had spoken to Jha once before, in July, about a Kalshi contract that plots the future price of computing power, and used that as the way into this conversation
Jha was appointed a few months before the interview and was speaking from London, which the show noted when introducing him
The show's own framing of perps was risk-forward throughout: one host followed the description of around-the-clock leveraged trading with "Further tightening the risk," before the guest had said anything
Jha acknowledged the categories are not clean — asked whether the sports accounts and the hedging accounts are separate populations, he did not claim they are
Jha's bottom line is that Kalshi's expansion into metals and, next, single stocks is not a bet on new demand but on removing the roll costs and contract sizes that kept retail out of dated futures, with the regulated clearing house as the thing that separates it from the offshore venues where the same instrument already trades.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Kalshi (Launched 24-7 perpetual futures on gold and silver the day before the interview, and is filing "in short order" for single-stock perps; Jha says its crypto perps have taken about 45 billion of trades)
CME Group (Jha's previous employer of about 16 years, and his benchmark for leverage — he says Kalshi's roughly 15 to 20x on gold is no different from CME's)
Commodity Futures Trading Commission (The regulator whose customer-protection rules on posted collateral Jha calls the significant value add over offshore perps)
The Wall Street Journal (The source the hosts credited for the single-stock perps story, including the roughly 60 contracts and the $100 billion market-value threshold)
Hyperliquid (Raised by a host as the offshore venue the audience associates with perpetuals, and the comparison Jha spent most of one answer rejecting)
Tesla, Apple and Nvidia (Named in the reporting as among the single stocks Kalshi would list perpetual futures on)
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