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

**John Wang** (0:00)
Prediction markets back then was kind of like a niche, like internet community. Since then, it's really grown a lot into the mainstream.

**Sam** (0:15)
Introducing RealFi, a smarter stable coin that's backed by real world assets. Launching August, 2026 Join the Testnet now at realfi.co. All right, we are here with John Wang, head of crypto at Kalshi. Very excited to have you. It's been quite a week for Kalshi in general, if we're going to talk about.
I read this morning, you guys just received a new investment at a valuation of $40 billion.
Must be just an exciting ride to be in this trade. Does it give you any feelings about the growth you've had?

**John Wang** (0:45)
Yeah, it's been pretty crazy since I joined. I think around a year ago now, like this week is my year mark. Yeah, prediction markets back then was kind of like a niche internet community. Since then, it's really grown a lot into the mainstream. I think the companies also have grown a lot in size. We just have a lot more inbound than we can deal with. So people are very like, yeah, very time constrained at the company and just trying to like prioritize things that matter most to us, whether it's like international growth, getting more hedges on the platform.
And our crypto growth has also been quite large. Like now it's the second largest on the platform. It's like catching up to sports actually. So it's great to be here at CoinDesk and talk more about that.

**Sam** (1:42)
All right, John, you did mention sports. I just want you to give us 30 seconds on the World Cup. And it sounded like that was an amazing, amazing six weeks for you guys.
Just tell us how that came about, what the type of activity you were seeing on the platform was, and what was so exciting to see an event that the entire world was focused on.

**John Wang** (2:05)
Yeah. I think this past year has really shown how big of an economic impact sport has on society.
The New York Knicks, for example, we're all here in New York, we felt how profound of an impact that was on general culture. And then with the World Cup, the whole world coalescing around the biggest sporting event every four years in America. And that was, I think, great timing. Brought a lot of international interest for Kalshi. And I think it catalyzed, like we did a bunch of like hedges around bars and restaurants and other institutions that might have economic impact from the World Cup. And they were able to do promotions and lay off their risk on Kalshi. And so it's been a huge onboarding event. And I think it's demonstrated just how important sports is in our daily lives, from an economic standpoint, and how prediction markets are a venue for people to trade on their beliefs around them.

**Sam** (3:10)
John, you mentioned the Knicks, you mentioned the World Cup.
The first half had these two large, amazing sort of global moments of attention and opportunity. Is there anything you're looking at at the second half of the year specifically that you think is going to get as much attention?

**John Wang** (3:26)
Yeah, well, on the crypto side, the Clarity Act has been a really big topic of conversation. We've actually seen large block trades and OTC trades around the Kalshi odds of the Clarity Act. I think it's sitting at 30% now, whether it's going to be passed this year. And so on the Polarithic side as well, the midterms are coming up. We launched a Kalshi midterms hub.
It's the best place to check out all the live odds around which candidates and stuff like that. But on the perp side, I think as well, we're going to start seeing a lot more regulatory unlocks with new asset classes that we've been filing for for perps. So that's going to be huge events as well in Q3, Q4 this year.

**Sam** (4:10)
And you guys have the first CFTC regulated perp market.
That's quite a coup because that was something that was not normally available to US traders. So just tell us about how you guys were able to stand that up and what it's been since launch.

**John Wang** (4:24)
Yeah, it's been one and a half years in the making process from adjusting our risk models to suit the CFTC framework to building the exchange full stack from the ground up, which is kind of like a different infrastructure from prediction markets. It's much more about deep liquidity and a smaller set of markets, but scaling that in a very technically efficient way with regards to transactions and the different set of traders as well. More like day traders and sophisticated advanced traders. We launched Kalshi Pro to kind of like hope with that perpetual push. It's like a new user interface for advanced traders. It also has predictions in it. But right now, we've seen a huge growth in adoption so far. A lot of Kalshi traders are trading perps now, and they see it as a longer time scale way to trade a lot of their prediction market, that they're currently making on our platform. And we're seeing a ton of users.