Webull's bitcoin perpetual will face an $18,260 to $27,150 margin benchmark
Webull already asks $18,260 to $27,150 of collateral per bitcoin of futures. A Kalshi perpetual needs to ask less to give retail traders a reason to switch.
Webull will let eligible American clients hold bitcoin futures that never expire, starting in November. The release does not give the margin, but Webull's own futures page shows the collateral it asks today.
The brokerage says it serves more than 29 million registered users globally. It announced the plan on Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. in New York. Trading will run through KalshiEX, a CFTC regulated designated contract market, and clear through Kalshi Klear.
A perpetual future is a leveraged contract with no expiry date. A periodic funding payment keeps its value close to the underlying asset. Webull's release says positions are subject to those payments and to automatic liquidation.
Margin is not the cost of a perpetual. It is the collateral a trader locks to hold the position and gets back when the position closes. The cost is the funding payment, the commission and the spread.
Margin still matters, because it decides how much capital a client needs and how far a position can fall before liquidation. It is also the one number Webull already publishes for comparable contracts.
The brokerage's futures page lists bitcoin contracts from two venues. Coinbase Derivatives offers a full bitcoin contract and a nano contract covering one hundredth of a bitcoin. CME offers a full contract of five bitcoin and a micro contract of a tenth.
Initial margin, the deposit needed to open a position, is $18,260 for one Coinbase Derivatives bitcoin contract. The nano contract needs $187. The CME micro needs $2,715.
The CME full size contract needs $135,030 for five bitcoin. Scaled to one bitcoin, that is $27,006.
Scaled the same way, the nano comes to $18,700 and the CME micro to $27,150. The dearest venue asks about half as much again as the cheapest.
Those are the figures a Kalshi perpetual has to beat. A contract that asks for more collateral per bitcoin than Coinbase Derivatives gives a trader little reason to move. The strongest case for the new product is margin at or below the Coinbase level.
A bitcoin price turns those deposits into leverage. Yahoo Finance showed bitcoin near $82,500 around midday on Tuesday. At that level, $18,260 is about 22 percent of the contract's value. The CME full size deposit is about 33 percent.
That is leverage of roughly three to four and a half times at initial margin. Kalshi's own perpetuals guide lists maximum leverage on bitcoin of 6.3 times. That implies a deposit near 16 percent of position value, or about $13,100 per bitcoin at $82,500. On Kalshi's own platform, the implied deposit is below every figure in Webull's table.
The nano contract shows the retail logic. It needs $187 to open, so a small account can hold bitcoin futures at all. A perpetual that wants the same clients must offer a similar entry ticket.
The October labels on the table matter. Each of these contracts belongs to a single delivery month and then ends. Margin figures will shift as bitcoin moves and as the clearing houses reset them. The percentages above are a Tuesday snapshot, not a fixed schedule.
Intraday margin, the lower deposit for positions closed the same day, runs at 4.5 percent of initial on the CME micro. It is 17.2 percent on the nano and 59 percent on the Coinbase bitcoin contract. Webull already asks very different amounts for the same asset.
All of these contracts expire. Webull's table lists monthly contracts, labelled October 2026. A trader holding bitcoin futures today rolls into the next month when the current one ends. A perpetual removes that step and replaces it with funding.
The roll has a cost of its own. A trader who rolls pays commission twice and crosses the spread twice, once to leave the old month and once to enter the new one. Funding replaces that fixed cost with one that grows with time.
Holding time then decides the bill. A trader who stays in for weeks pays funding many times. A trader who closes within hours pays it rarely or not at all.
Webull executive Tanmay Sheth promises "clear visibility into margin requirements, funding rates, leverage and liquidation levels." Those four figures are the ones to read when the product reaches accounts.
Anthony Denier, Webull's U.S. chief executive, says perpetual futures have become a significant part of global derivatives markets. He puts annual volume above $90 trillion in 2025. That figure says little about what a U.S. retail account will pay.
The regulated route changes where the activity sits. The release frames a CFTC supervised alternative as bringing more activity into a regulated, onshore framework. Funding and automatic liquidation stay intact, so the risk to a retail trader is the same in kind.
Webull Futures LLC is a CFTC registered futures commission merchant and an NFA member. Webull also offers prediction markets in the same app. A client will have crypto, futures and event contracts behind one login.
The release says the initial offering will include bitcoin and other crypto assets. Additional products are to follow, subject to regulatory review and exchange listing. Perpetual futures will go first to eligible U.S. customers already approved for futures trading, inside their existing Webull Futures accounts.
The first accounts go live in November, and broader availability is promised before the year ends. By 31 December 2026, Webull's futures page should show a Kalshi perpetual margin figure beside the CME and Coinbase Derivatives rows. That row will show whether the new contract sits below the range of $18,260 to $27,150 per bitcoin.