Kalshi teams up with Solana: Is the US's first compliant prediction market starting to harvest crypto users?
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Kalshi teams up with Solana: Is the US's first compliant prediction market starting to harvest crypto users?
Kalshi doesn't need to "build another chain," but rather "attach ready-made wings." Solana happens to be those wings.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Chain Revelation
1. Breaking: U.S. Compliance King Kalshi Teams Up with Solana to Capture Liquidity
On the morning of December 1, 2025, CNBC broke exclusive news: Kalshi, the first and currently only prediction market platform in U.S. history to receive full regulation from the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), has begun allowing users to buy and sell tokenized versions of its event contracts on the Solana blockchain.
This means that by tokenizing fully compliant betting contracts, Kalshi has instantly connected tens of billions in crypto liquidity to a legally sanctioned market across all 50 U.S. states.
John Wang, head of Kalshi's crypto business, said in a media interview that by entering the $3 trillion digital asset market, Kalshi will gain the liquidity needed to scale its product offerings—just as investor demand for prediction markets is rapidly growing.
To achieve this, Kalshi has done two key things:
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It now supports DeFi protocols such as DFlow and Jupiter connecting Kalshi’s off-chain order book with Solana-based liquidity.
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It has announced over $2 million in "Kalshi Builder Grants," with Axiom confirmed as the next official partner, and plans to support more blockchains in the future.
In addition, Kalshi raised $1 billion in a November funding round led by Sequoia Capital and CapitalG, valuing the company at approximately $11 billion—putting it on par with its main rival Polymarket.——The latter announced a strategic investment deal with Intercontinental Exchange (ICE, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) at the end of October, with ICE committing up to $2 billion, pushing Polymarket’s post-money valuation to around $9 billion (pre-money ~$8 billion).
2. Why Now? Why Solana?
Fast forward three months earlier. In September 2025, Kalshi surpassed Polymarket in monthly trading volume for the first time ($1.3B vs $773M). In October, both platforms nearly simultaneously hit record highs: Kalshi at $4.39B, Polymarket at $3.02B. After the election-driven surge faded, both realized: the next billion-dollar frontier isn’t politics, but sports, macroeconomic data, entertainment, and weather. Yet their paths diverged completely:
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Polymarket: Choosing to double down on decentralization—planning a formal return to the U.S. market in 2026 plus launching the $POLY token;
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Kalshi: Opting for a “half-step on-chain” model—keeping core settlement and compliance layers in-house while fully opening the liquidity layer to the crypto world.
Solana was almost an inevitable choice:
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Real user transaction throughput consistently stable at 700–1,000 TPS, peaking above 3,000–5,000 TPS—far exceeding most other public chains; average transaction gas fee typically under $0.002, even during congestion rarely exceeding $0.01;
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Jupiter dominates Solana’s ecosystem as the primary router and aggregator, with TVL reaching $2.6 billion;
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Phantom wallet has surpassed 15 million monthly active users, with mobile experience (built-in DApp browser, native NFT support, one-click Swap) widely considered superior to MetaMask’s mobile version;
Over the past 12 months, prediction market protocols within the Solana ecosystem (Parcl, Hedgies, Limitless, etc.) have already educated and retained a large number of users familiar with prediction markets, providing Kalshi’s on-chain contracts with an immediate user base and market mindshare.
What Kalshi didn’t need was “building another chain”—it needed “ready-made wings.” And Solana happened to be those wings.
3. Kalshi vs Polymarket: Ultimate 2025 Comparison Table
4. After the Power Alliance: Who Gets Hit? Who Benefits?
Hardest Hit: Polymarket and Its "Crypto-Native Users"
For the past year, Polymarket’s greatest pride was enabling an Iranian address and an Argentine address to freely bet against each other on the U.S. election without barriers. Now, Kalshi has perfectly cracked this advantage with “KYC once, play freely afterward.” A significant number of mid-tier whales have already started moving funds from Polymarket to Kalshi on Solana because:
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Lower slippage;
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No oracle disputes;
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Wallet anonymity can still be maintained.
By granting users greater anonymity while wielding regulatory compliance as a weapon, this tokenization move poses a real threat to Polymarket and similar prediction platforms’ market share.
Biggest Winner: The Solana Ecosystem
Overnight, Kalshi has funneled massive compliant prediction market liquidity directly into Solana:
TVL will visibly surge, Jupiter gains unprecedented real order depth, and Phantom wallet rockets back to the top of the App Store utility charts—not short-term hype, but the true activation of Solana’s “super entry point” for prediction markets.
From now on, political, sports, macroeconomic, entertainment—all real-world uncertainties now have the fastest, cheapest, deepest trading venue on Solana.
Long-Term Beneficiaries: The Entire Prediction Market Sector
The result of competition will be further concentration of liquidity, tighter spreads, and exponential improvements in user experience. Before the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, breaking $10 billion in monthly trading volume is no longer in doubt.
5. Polymarket’s Window for Counterattack: Only 6–9 Months Left
Currently, Polymarket still holds three cards:
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$POLY token (community incentives + fee dividends);
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Formal re-entry into the U.S. market in 2026 (CFTC exemption in final stages);
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Bolder market themes (as long as legal, always willing to go further than Kalshi).
But time is running out. Kalshi has already proven: regulation is not a burden—it’s the sharpest spear.
When you can offer both regulatory safety and an unparalleled on-chain experience, the so-called “decentralization faith” becomes laughably fragile in the face of real money.
6. Conclusion: The Next Trigger Switch?
December 1, 2025 will undoubtedly go down in the history of prediction markets. It’s not crypto defeating traditional finance, nor traditional finance defeating crypto.
It’s simply another validation of a fundamental business truth: users always vote for the side that’s “easier to use, cheaper, and safer,” even if it’s only 5% better than the alternative.
And the “liquidity switch” Kalshi pressed today on Solana has prematurely ignited the second half of the prediction market era.
Now there’s only one thing left to watch: whether Polymarket can press its own switch before summer 2026.
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