How the World Cup Became One of Kalshi's Biggest Onboarding Events

Kalshi received a new investment at a 40 billion dollar valuation around the time of this conversation, and prediction markets have moved from a niche internet community into the mainstream over the past year. Crypto has grown into the second largest category on the platform, catching up to sports, and the platform now operates the first CFTC-regulated perpetual futures market available to US traders.

The World Cup was one of Kalshi's biggest onboarding events, drawing significant international interest and bringing new users onto the platform. Kalshi also facilitated hedges for bars, restaurants, and other institutions with direct economic exposure to the tournament, allowing them to lay off that risk on the platform. Wang drew a parallel to the New York Knicks, describing a similar cultural and economic impact felt locally in New York, suggesting the model of institutions hedging event-driven revenue exposure is repeatable across major sporting events.

Kalshi launched a midterms hub positioned as the best place to track live odds on candidates. The Clarity Act is currently sitting at 30 percent odds of passing this year according to Kalshi markets, and Wang noted that large block trades and OTC trades have been placed around those odds, indicating that sophisticated participants are already using regulatory prediction markets as actionable signals rather than just sentiment gauges.

Building the perpetual futures exchange took one and a half years, requiring the team to adjust risk models to the CFTC framework and build the exchange full stack from the ground up. The platform did approximately one billion dollars in perp volume in the first week and approximately five billion in the first month. Wang said Kalshi is the cheapest perp exchange to trade on in terms of crypto fees, though he acknowledged the platform is still in early innings and needs more large traders to deepen liquidity and tighten spreads further.

Kalshi Pro is a new interface for advanced traders that combines perpetuals and predictions in one place. Wang said many Kalshi traders use perps as a longer time-scale way to trade positions they are already expressing in prediction markets, meaning the two products are complementary rather than competing for the same user behavior. Kalshi's monthly active user base for perps is approximately half that of Hyperliquid. Wang estimated that roughly 99 percent of US users have never heard of or traded perpetual futures, and described lifecycle tools including stop loss, take profit, chart-based drag controls, and liquidation visibility as central to educating that audience rather than assuming prior familiarity.

Kalshi has a social feature incorporating live chat, social posts, and public display of open positions, which Wang said creates a community learning effect where newer users can observe how experienced traders are positioned. Wang said he was bearish on agent-to-agent trading a year ago but has since changed his view based on observed adoption. Third-party bots built on Kalshi's API suite support strategies including price dislocation plays, event triggers, and funding rate arbitrages across perp exchanges, and Wang described Kalshi's API suite as more accessible than those of other US perp or crypto exchanges, which he framed as a deliberate advantage for attracting systematic and automated flow.