Kalshi Picks Solana To Ignite Tokenized Event Trading
Kalshi has switched on tokenized variations of its occasion contracts on Solana, making its first specific play to court docket the identical crypto-native merchants who’ve funneled billions of {dollars} into rival prediction platform Polymarket.
Instead of holding positions solely as conventional off-chain contracts on Kalshi’s regulated venue, customers can now purchase and promote tokenized representations of these wagers on Solana. The financial publicity is similar, however the wrapper is crypto-native: the guess turns into a transferable token on a public blockchain.
Solana Lands Kalshi’s First Fully Tokenized Event Markets
“The tokenized variations of the contracts work the identical approach because the common ones discovered beforehand on Kalshi’s platform,” the corporate told CNBC. The key distinction is market construction. By buying and selling the tokens relatively than the contracts themselves, customers can function with higher pseudonymity and extra flexibility in how they custody and transfer positions, placing Kalshi “on par with Polymarket, which permits customers to commerce immediately on-chain.”
Support for these tokenized wagers is already dwell on Solana. Decentralized finance protocols DFlow and Jupiter are onboarding as institutional conduits, successfully bridging Kalshi’s off-chain orderbook into Solana’s liquidity. That hyperlink is designed to let crypto-native merchants uncover, route and dimension positions via the DeFi stack whereas Kalshi continues to run its core matching and settlement infrastructure in a regulated atmosphere.
The timing coincides with a pointy upswing in prediction market exercise. Combined buying and selling quantity in prediction markets reached virtually $28 billion via October 2025, with a weekly file of $2.3 billion within the week of October 20, in line with knowledge cited from Crypto.com’s analysis arm. Kalshi’s thesis is that the following leg of progress will probably be pushed by the digital asset market, which it pegs at roughly $3 trillion and closely populated by merchants already snug with on-chain threat.
“There’s loads of energy customers in crypto,” mentioned John Wang, Kalshi’s head of crypto. “This is about tapping into the billions of {dollars} of liquidity that crypto has, after which additionally enabling builders to construct third social gathering entrance ends that make the most of Kalshi’s liquidity.”
Founded in 2018, Kalshi was the primary change to roll out federally regulated occasion contracts on US congressional races for American merchants in late 2024, following a years-long authorized battle with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Since then, it has expanded to roughly 3,500 markets, raised greater than $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, and grown its footprint to over 140 nations, in line with the corporate.
That regulatory and capital benefit is being examined as Polymarket strikes to relaunch within the US and different rivals scale. Kalshi’s management is successfully betting that deeper liquidity is the decisive differentiator — and that crypto merchants are the marginal source of that liquidity.
Digital asset holders are inclined to commerce prediction markets at greater volumes than non-crypto customers, Wang mentioned, arguing that their funds can meaningfully thicken orderbooks and sharpen pricing throughout Kalshi’s markets. “If you might have a market with no liquidity, then you definately don’t actually have a market,” he mentioned. “People can’t actually commerce dimension or get the costs that they need.”
At press time, Solana (SOL) traded at $126.86.
