Polymarket, the widely used prediction market platform where users wager on the outcome of real-world events, has rolled out a new leveraged trading product called Polymarket Perps, letting eligible international users trade crypto, stocks, indices, and commodities with leverage reaching up to 20x.
Confirmed through a Thursday announcement on X, the offering is available anywhere it’s legally permitted and gives traders the flexibility to open either long or short positions, all through Polymarket’s existing platform.
This marks a significant expansion beyond the company’s traditional event-based betting model, pushing it squarely into leveraged derivatives trading, an entirely different product category from the prediction contracts that built its reputation.
Polymarket Perps is live.
Up to 20x leverage on crypto, stocks, commodities, & more. Deepest liquidity, lowest fees.
Long BTC, predict the Fed, short the S&P reaction — only on Polymarket.com
👉 https://t.co/UwdkHrmEMT pic.twitter.com/hwOULeRjIH
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) September 3, 2026
Perps Let Traders Go Long Or Short With Leverage
The initial rollout covers ten markets, spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, HYPE, gold, silver, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, WTI crude oil, and SPCX. With Perps, traders effectively place bets on price direction rather than a predetermined event outcome. They can use leverage up to 20 times their starting capital to increase their exposure, going long if they predict an asset to rise or short if they anticipate a decrease.
These perpetual instruments, in contrast to regular futures contracts, have no set expiration date, thus a position can theoretically remain open indefinitely as long as the trader has enough margin to support it.
Polymarket has marketed the new product around deep liquidity and competitive fee structures, while also giving users a single interface to move fluidly between crypto assets, equities, indices, and commodities rather than needing separate platforms for each. The company is positioning Perps as particularly useful around major market-moving events, including Federal Reserve policy announcements and sharp swings in major stock indices.
Polymarket Upgrades Infrastructure To Handle Surging Order Volume
Behind the scenes, Polymarket has also been quietly overhauling its trading infrastructure to handle the anticipated surge in activity. The company is targeting throughput of 200,000 orders per second, roughly fifteen times its current processing capacity, with an even more ambitious longer-term goal of supporting over 400,000 orders per second.
According to comments from a Polymarket engineering team member on X, the platform’s underlying order-matching system had accumulated significant technical debt from rapid early growth, though the team says it has already achieved a tenfold scaling improvement and tripled processing speed since taking on the rebuild.
Early testing has reportedly delivered a 10-to-20-times improvement in p99 latency, a technical measure of how long the slowest-processing orders take to execute during high-traffic periods, suggesting the platform should hold up more reliably when trading volume spikes.
CFTC Oversight Still Governs Derivatives Access For U.S. Traders
Despite the international rollout, U.S.-based traders shouldn’t expect immediate access to the same product. Any derivatives offered to American customers remain governed by Commodity Futures Trading Commission requirements, and Polymarket’s self-certification of these new contracts doesn’t equate to formal CFTC approval, meaning regulators retain the authority to review or halt specific contracts before they could ever go live domestically.
Polymarket has also drawn a clear line between Perps and its existing crypto price event contracts, the latter of which simply ask whether an asset like Bitcoin or Ethereum will land above, below, or within a defined price range by a set time, rather than supporting the kind of ongoing, leveraged position management that Perps is built around.
A Broader Industry Shift Toward Leveraged Trading
Polymarket isn’t alone in expanding into this territory. Rival platforms have been moving in a similar direction, with Coinbase recently broadening its own futures lineup in Canada, giving eligible investors access to crypto futures alongside contracts tied to gold, silver, oil, and its COIN50 crypto index.
With this latest launch, Polymarket effectively adds an entirely new business line, layering leveraged trading across crypto and traditional markets on top of its established prediction-market foundation.
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