Jeff Bandman Named Kalshi Prime CEO to Lead Perpetual Futures Expansion
Kalshi has appointed Jeff Bandman as chief executive of Kalshi Prime, the company’s CFTC-registered futures commission merchant. The move puts a familiar figure in charge of the vehicle that serves customers of Kalshi’s margined perpetual futures business. Bandman led Kalshi’s regulatory strategy from its earliest days and helped secure the company’s 2020 designation as a CFTC-regulated exchange. He now returns to steer its most significant product expansion since launching its core event contracts platform.
Why the Kalshi Prime appointment matters now
The choice of Bandman says more than the job title does. Kalshi could have handed this role to a growth operator. Instead it picked the person who built its regulatory foundation. For a product still new to US-regulated markets, that reads as a deliberate signal about where the company thinks its advantage lies.
Perpetual futures are a contract type that tracks whether an asset’s price rises or falls, without the fixed expiry date of a traditional future. The category has grown fast offshore. According to Kalshi, annual volumes climbed from under $1 trillion in 2018 to over $90 trillion in 2025, and much of that market has been closed to American institutions until recently. That backdrop explains the urgency. It also explains why regulatory credibility, rather than speed, sits at the centre of the hire.
What the Kalshi Prime CEO role actually involves
Kalshi Prime launched in June 2026 to support margin-backed perpetual futures. As its futures commission merchant, it handles the customer-facing side of that business, combining risk management with access to hedging tools for both retail and institutional clients.
Bandman’s background fits the mandate closely. He is a former senior CFTC official who led the Division of Clearing and Risk and the Office of International Affairs, initiated the agency’s digital asset work, launched its LabCFTC unit, and negotiated clearinghouse equivalence with the European Commission. Most recently he served as chief operating officer and general counsel of 6529 Holdings and 6529 Capital, described by Kalshi as an institutional alternative asset manager for digital assets.
His history with the company runs deep. Kalshi spent four years securing its CFTC status, work Bandman spearheaded. Co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara approached more than sixty lawyers who told them regulation was impossible before finding him. The exchange secured federal regulation in 2020 and launched trading in 2021.
What the appointment signals for Kalshi
“Jeff believed in Kalshi when most people thought it could never be regulated,” said Tarek Mansour, co-founder and chief executive of Kalshi. The read here is straightforward. Kalshi is treating the compliance and clearing side of perpetuals as the thing that earns institutional trust, not a box to tick after launch.
Bandman framed the ambition around rebuilding the FCM model itself. He pointed to industry consolidation and shrinking customer choice as the opening, arguing a non-bank FCM using modern technology can serve institutions, individual investors, and the businesses that use derivatives to manage real-world risk.
The open questions around Kalshi’s perpetuals push
One number carries a caveat. The $90 trillion perpetual figure comes from Kalshi’s own account and has not been independently verified here. It sets the scale of the opportunity, but readers should treat it as the company’s framing rather than a settled market statistic. The appointment also does not, on its own, tell us how the FCM will perform under stress. Personnel signals intent. Execution is a separate test.
What comes next for Kalshi’s perpetual futures market?
The near-term story is operational. Over the coming months, the market should watch how Kalshi Prime manages clearing, margin, and risk as perpetuals scale under a fresh regulatory frame. That performance will shape how much confidence institutional customers place in the product, and whether Kalshi’s compliance-first bet translates into durable market share. For a company expanding from event contracts toward a broader financial exchange, the appointment is less a headline moment than a statement of priorities: build credibility first, and let the volumes follow.
Source: Kalshi
