Kalshi Challenges Polymarket’s Crypto Connections, Launching Tokenized Event Trading Via Phantom Wallet
Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s CEO, has recently joined billionaire ranks alongside his cofounder Luana Lopes Lara
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Prediction markets operator Kalshi is pushing deeper into crypto. The New York-based company is making its event trading available directly inside Phantom, one of the most widely used crypto wallets.
John Wang, Kalshi’s recently appointed head of crypto, touted the tie-up as the company’s “biggest crypto announcement yet.”
“We would like to have Kalshi’s prediction markets in every large crypto app,” he previously told Forbes. “Crypto has a super power user community, people who live and breathe cutting edge financial technology every single day.”
The integration means Phantom’s 15 million+ global users will be able to buy and sell tokenized versions of wagers on Kalshi’s contracts without leaving the wallet using tokens like SOL or CASH, a Solana stablecoin Phantom launched in September.
Earlier this month, Kalshi moved its markets onto the Solana blockchain and partnered with decentralized finance platforms DFlow and Jupiter, which help route Kalshi’s order-book liquidity onto blockchain infrastructure. Although Phantom also supports Ethereum, Polygon and a crop of other blockchains, Kalshi will not be offering tokenized positions elsewhere yet.
For Kalshi, the partnership is part of a broader effort to compete with crypto-native Polymarket. Both set monthly volume records in November: Kalshi logged $5.8 billion in trading, up 32% from October, while Polymarket handled $3.7 billion, according to Dune Analytics.
Last week, the company closed a $1 billion Series E round, led by Paradigm, valuing it at $11 billion and instantly turning cofounders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara into billionaires. At 29, Lopes Lara became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire.
Meanwhile, Kalshi is also juggling regulatory fights in several states. This week, it won a temporary pause against an enforcement action by Connecticut, which, like multiple other states, has argued that Kalshi’s event-based contracts amount to unlicensed online gambling. The firm counters that because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved it as a designated contract market in 2020, state gambling laws don’t apply.
