Polymarket launched perpetual futures, branded Polymarket Perps, on September 3, 2026. The product starts with ten markets, from bitcoin and oil to a SpaceX tracker, at leverage of up to 20x. It is open to international users only, Prediction News reported.
The crypto markets are bitcoin, ether, Solana and Hyperliquid's HYPE. Gold, silver and West Texas Intermediate oil cover commodities, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 cover indices, and SPCX is a contract tracking SpaceX shares. Traders can go long or short, and the whole product trades around the clock.
Bloomberg's angle was the oil contract, a never-expiring futures instrument on a market that traditionally closes. Investing.com framed the launch as a 24/7 trading push. Ours is narrower. We track a confirmed but dateless POLY token, and every new product on this platform gets read by farmers as a new way to qualify.
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
The post is quoted as the reports carried it, except that its one long dash appears as a comma. The original is linked.
It leaves out one qualifier. Polymarket's own wording, Crypto Briefing reported, is that the product is available internationally in jurisdictions where it is legally permitted. Prediction News states the consequence: US customers cannot access the international perps service under the company's current restrictions.
That split is the structure of Polymarket in 2026. The US app that relaunched in May runs on the CFTC-registered derivatives entity the company acquired, offers event contracts and does not carry perps. The international exchange, which set volume records through the World Cup, now does. Two products, two rulebooks, one brand.
What the launch is built on
The numbers around the launch are large and, for now, self-reported. Prediction News says the beta period drew $13 billion in cumulative volume before the public opening. That would already place the product among the busier perps venues if it holds up in the open.
Coingape reports that Polymarket is targeting 200,000 orders per second on its trading infrastructure, with a stated path beyond 400,000. It also cites a ten to twenty times improvement in tail latency, the delay on the slowest requests. We could not verify any of these figures from public on-chain or exchange data, so we quote them as the company's own claims.
In our reading, that is the specification a company publishes when it intends to compete with Hyperliquid rather than complement it. The market list points the same way. It includes a HYPE perp on day one, an oil perp aimed at the Fed-and-energy trade of the past week, and a SpaceX tracker for retail traders seeking pre-IPO exposure.
Four perps, including a rival venue token.
The macro-event trade the X post pitches.
Never-expiring oil was the Bloomberg angle.
A contract tracking SpaceX shares.
Why this matters for the POLY airdrop, and why it might not
Polymarket's marketing chief said in October 2025 that there will be a token and an airdrop, and that the airdrop will not reward farming or speculative participation. A perps product is, by construction, the most farmable surface a platform can add. Volume is cheap to manufacture with leverage, wash patterns are trivial, and the activity has little to do with the prediction-market behavior the company says it values.
If Polymarket means what it said, perps volume should carry little or no weight in any future allocation. Traders churning 20x positions to qualify would then pay funding and fees for a reward the issuer has said it does not intend to give. If it does not mean it, the criteria are still unpublished, and no position can be sized around a formula that does not exist.
Either way the rational behavior is the one in our farming guide. That means trading only markets where a trader has a view, at a size that makes sense with no token in the picture, on the same account used all along.
The launch also changes the scope of the platform a token would represent. A Polymarket that runs event contracts in the United States and leveraged perps everywhere else is larger and more diversified than the company that confirmed a token last October. With a HYPE perp on the board, it also competes with the venue whose genesis airdrop set the standard everyone still measures against.
That competition is the part to watch. Hyperliquid built its distribution around real users of a product that already worked, and Polymarket now has two products and has made the same promise. The claim page, when there is one, will arrive through the company's verified channels. Any site that says perps activity boosts an allocation is noise or phishing.
