Kalshi makes move to court crypto traders with tokenized betting contracts

Kalshi bettors can now buy and sell tokenized versions of their wagers on Solana, the company told CNBC exclusively on Monday. It’s the latest sign the prediction market company is deepening its push to win over the same cryptocurrency holders that have pumped billions of dollars of digital assets into its rival Polymarket.

Tokenization refers to creating a digital version of a real-world financial asset such as a stock, bond or treasury note. The resulting token, which can be held or traded like a normal asset, lives on a decentralized ledger called a blockchain, such as Solana or Bitcoin.

The tokenized versions of the contracts work the same way as the regular ones found previously on Kalshi’s platform. However, by trading the tokens instead of the actual contracts, users have more anonymity. This puts Kalshi on par with Polymarket, which allows users to trade directly on-chain.

Support for tokenized wagers linked to Kalshi’s event contracts is live on Solana, Kalshi told CNBC. Decentralized finance protocols DFlow and Jupiter will serve as institutional clients, bridging the exchange’s off-chain orderbook to Solana’s liquidity.

Kalshi is doubling down on its push to court crypto holders as demand for event contracts surges. Prediction markets’ combined trading volume hit nearly $28 billion through October of this year, hitting a weekly record high of $2.3 billion during the week of October 20, according to data cited by Crypto.com’s research arm.

By tapping into the $3 trillion digital asset market, Kalshi will be able to shore up liquidity needed to scale its offerings at a time when investors’ appetites for prediction markets is growing rapidly, John Wang, the company’s head of crypto, told CNBC.  

“There’s a lot of power users in crypto,” Wang said. “This is about tapping into the billions of dollars of liquidity that crypto has, and then also enabling developers to build third party front ends that utilize Kalshi’s liquidity.” 

Founded in 2018, Kalshi was the first exchange to launch federally regulated event contracts on U.S. congressional races for American traders in late 2024, shortly after winning a years-long legal battle against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 

Since then, Kalshi has added more event contracts to its platform, running about 3,500 markets, according to a company representative. Last fall, it raised more than $300 million at a $5 billion valuation in a funding round backed by crypto heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, in addition to expanding its footprint to more than 140 countries.

But, it’s first-mover advantage may not be enough to keep the platform competitive, particularly as Polymarket relaunches in the U.S. Kalshi will need to continue to grow to edge out its rivals, and it will need ample liquidity to do so – something crypto-native traders’ funds could provide, according to Wang.

Digital asset holders tend to be particularly active on prediction markets, trading at higher volumes compared to their non-crypto peers, meaning their presence on the platform is likely to meaningfully boost liquidity across Kalshi’s markets, the executive said. And by tapping into that massive liquidity, Kalshi can ensure competitive and accurate pricing across its platform, he added. 

“If you have a market with no liquidity, then you don’t really have a market,” Wang said. “People can’t really trade size or get the prices that they want.”