While Kalshi continues to make inroads on the blockchain, the prediction market has no intention of becoming crypto-centric.
Yes, Kalshi sees crypto as critical to its growth, but the company doesn’t have to make a binary decision, according to CEO Tarek Mansour. It doesn’t have to be either on-chain or off-chain.
Instead, the objective is to be accessible to crypto natives and mainstream users alike.
“Over time, I see kind of a seamless integration where there’s obviously gonna be an unchained flavor to this, and for crypto Twitter and the crypto native people, there’ll be an experience that they’re used to,” Mansour said on a recent episode of Jason Yanowitz’s Empire podcast.
Mansour, though, likens crypto to AI – if companies don’t embrace it, they’re putting themselves at a sizable disadvantage.
Five years from now, Mansour forecasts, “There’s gonna be companies that have adopted AI to improve the product experience, and companies that didn’t, which are gonna be left behind. And I think crypto is the same thing.”
Mansour said in its early stages, Kalshi decided against going on chain because such a path would have made regulation an even greater challenge. Now that legal hurdles have been cleared – there are many more ahead, of course – and the company is on an exponential trajectory for growth, the timing is right for crypto expansion.
“I think it’s the first time I feel like there’s openness to basically bring more of crypto and embed them into financial services,” he said.
Kalshi’s Latest Crypto Move
Kalshi announced on Monday a deal for Pyth Network to distribute its odds data across 100 blockchains.
The partnership puts Kalshi’s data into the hands of developers to build products related to sports, elections, interest rate decisions, and plenty more (Taylor Swift, anyone?).
The press release announcing the deal lists the World Series, Formula 1, and New York mayoral election as markets Pyth is already distributing on-chain.
The Pyth tie-up is just the latest effort by Kalshi to enhance its crypto relevancy, one area where many prediction market users and observers believe the company doesn’t yet measure up to Polymarket.
Competing Against Crypto Exchanges and Other Asset Classes
At the SEC/CFTC joint roundtable late last month, Kalshi’s Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan sat on a panel of fintech luminaries alongside the likes of CME Group’s Terrence Duffy, Nasdaq’s Adena Friedman, Kraken’s Arjun Sethi, and Intercontinental Exchange’s Jeffrey Sprecher (the lattermost of whom announced a $2 billion investment in Polymarket about a week later).
The dynamic was representative of a future in which trading on prediction market platforms spans far beyond yes/no binary markets.
“You’ll be an everything exchange,” Yanowitz inferred, “You’ll be able to trade tokens and stocks and everything on the platform. Is that the end goal?
“… You’re not just competing against Polymarket and other prediction markets platforms. You’re competing against Coinbase and Nasdaq.”
“I’ve always thought that the competition at the end of the day is the asset classes themselves,” Mansour affirmed, noting Kalshi translates to “everything” in Arabic.
“How do we make prediction markets and over time, Kalshi, which is gonna incorporate multiple asset classes, a bigger piece of the pie? And we have a long way to go, but I agree with you,” the CEO continued.
“I think all of these will intersect over time, because trading is trading. Is trading on a stock that fundamentally different from trading on politics? Not really if they’re both very liquid. It’s kind of the same thing.”
