Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure
Kalshi has switched on tokenized versions of its event contracts on Solana, making its first explicit play to court the same crypto-native traders who have funneled billions of dollars into rival prediction platform Polymarket.
Instead of holding positions solely as traditional off-chain contracts on Kalshi’s regulated venue, users can now buy and sell tokenized representations of those wagers on Solana. The economic exposure is identical, but the wrapper is crypto-native: the bet becomes a transferable token on a public blockchain.
“The tokenized versions of the contracts work the same way as the regular ones found previously on Kalshi’s platform,” the company told CNBC. The key difference is market structure. By trading the tokens rather than the contracts themselves, users can operate with greater pseudonymity and more flexibility in how they custody and move positions, putting Kalshi “on par with Polymarket, which allows users to trade directly on-chain.”
Support for these tokenized wagers is already live on Solana. Decentralized finance protocols DFlow and Jupiter are onboarding as institutional conduits, effectively bridging Kalshi’s off-chain orderbook into Solana’s liquidity. That link is designed to let crypto-native traders discover, route and size positions through the DeFi stack while Kalshi continues to run its core matching and settlement infrastructure in a regulated environment.
The timing coincides with a sharp upswing in prediction market activity. Combined trading volume in prediction markets reached almost $28 billion through October 2025, with a weekly record of $2.3 billion in the week of October 20, according to data cited from Crypto.com’s research arm. Kalshi’s thesis is that the next leg of growth will be driven by the digital asset market, which it pegs at roughly $3 trillion and heavily populated by traders already comfortable with on-chain risk.
“There’s a lot of power users in crypto,” said John Wang, Kalshi’s head of crypto. “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 roll out federally regulated event contracts on US congressional races for American traders in late 2024, following a years-long legal battle with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Since then, it has expanded to roughly 3,500 markets, raised more than $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, and grown its footprint to over 140 countries, according to the company.
That regulatory and capital advantage is being tested as Polymarket moves to relaunch in the US and other competitors scale. Kalshi’s leadership is effectively betting that deeper liquidity is the decisive differentiator — and that crypto traders are the marginal source of that liquidity.
Digital asset holders tend to trade prediction markets at higher volumes than non-crypto users, Wang said, arguing that their funds can meaningfully thicken orderbooks and sharpen pricing across Kalshi’s markets. “If you have a market with no liquidity, then you don’t really have a market,” he said. “People can’t really trade size or get the prices that they want.”
