Kalshi today announced that derivatives market executive Jeff Bandman has been appointed CEO of Kalshi Prime, Kalshi's CFTC-registered futures commission merchant (FCM). Bandman, who led Kalshi's regulatory strategy from its earliest days and helped secure its 2020 designation as a CFTC-regulated exchange, returns to lead the FCM that serves customers of Kalshi's margined perpetual futures business.
Jeff Bandman is a former senior CFTC official who led the Division of Clearing and Risk and the Office of International Affairs, initiated the CFTC’s digital asset work, led the design and launch of LabCFTC, and negotiated “clearinghouse equivalence” with the European Commission. Most recently, he served as COO and General Counsel of 6529 Holdings and 6529 Capital, a leading institutional alternative asset manager for digital assets.
Bandman was instrumental to Kalshi’s regulatory-first approach. Spearheaded by Bandman, the company spent four years achieving its regulatory status with the CFTC. Co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara called sixty-plus lawyers who told them it was impossible before they found Bandman who believed they could get it done. In 2020, Kalshi successfully secured federal regulation and launched trading in 2021.
Kalshi’s goal is to build the FCM of the future, combining rigorous risk management and obsessive service with access to hedging tools for retail and institutional customers. It launched Kalshi Prime in June 2026 to pave the way for margin-backed perpetual futures.
“Jeff believed in Kalshi when most people thought it could never be regulated,” said Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi. “He helped us turn that idea into a CFTC-designated exchange. There is no one better to lead the FCM that will power Kalshi's next chapter.”
Perpetual futures are Kalshi's most significant product expansion since the introduction of event contracts and reinforce the company's position as a full-service financial exchange.
Perpetuals are a form of futures contract that simply tracks whether or not the price of an asset goes up or down, instead of tracking prices pegged to a specific date. Offshore perpetuals have grown from less than $1 trillion in annual volume in 2018 to over $90 trillion in 2025, making them one of the fastest-growing asset classes ever — and one that has been entirely closed off to American institutions until recently.
"Our goal is to build the FCM of the future, rethinking from first principles what an FCM can be and designing it around how derivatives markets and their customers are evolving, not how they operated decades ago,” said Jeff Bandman, CEO of Kalshi Prime. “As the industry has consolidated and customer choice has diminished, we see an opportunity to use modern technology and the flexibility of a non-bank FCM to serve the full market: institutions, individual investors, and the farmers, producers, merchants and businesses that use derivatives to manage real-world risk."
Bandman received his undergraduate degree from Yale magna cum laude, with honors in both History and English, and his law degree from Stanford Law School. He is a six-time Jeopardy! Champion.
