Kalshi Doubles in Evaluation, Reaches $22bn

After the latest funding round, the leading prediction marketplace Kalshi has doubled its valuation compared to 5 months ago. The Series F funding amounted to $1bn, bringing Kalshi’s total valuation to $22bn. 

The funding was backed by Wall Street and Silicon Valley behemoths such as Ark Invest, Sequoia Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Andreessen Horowitz, whose a16z arm just raised $2.2bn with prediction markets among its main investment targets.

Kalshi and Crypto

Alongside Polymarket, Kalshi is one of the most valuable prediction marketplaces in the world. Unlike Polymarket, though, which runs on a decentralized platform, Kalshi is a federally regulated marketplace that is now making a large market push into crypto. 

The company’s recently appointed head of crypto, John Wang, hardly hid the ambition when he told Forbes that they want “to have Kalshi’s prediction markets in every large crypto app.” This was for the grand occasion of integrating its offering into the Phantom wallet. Kalshi is also available on Trust Wallet, Solflare, and Coinbase.

The main thing for Kalshi in the latter part of 2026 is testing how its markets can interact with crypto wallets and other on-chain platforms. The focus appears to be on technical integration and accessibility, rather than on expanding aggressively into new markets, a rule that Kalshi has held to heart since its official launch in 2021.

Prediction Markets in 2026

Prediction markets are this big thing that let ordinary people bet on real-world events such as football games, election outcomes, Survivor winners, or more mundane things like the highest temperatures in LA today.

They raise a lot of legal dust, too. The main scrutiny is that prediction markets look an awful lot like online or crypto gambling, which is banned in multiple US states. Kalshi itself faces as many as 19 deferral lawsuits on that precise account, with states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Arizona and others challenging Kalshi’s event-based markets.

Of particular scrutiny are geopolitical markets. Examples include Kalshi’s 51% chance that the Strait of Hormuz will return to normal before August 1 or the prediction on the exact date of Trump’s upcoming visit to China. Washington State is the latest to join the state-level legal effort against Kalshi, calling into question the randomness of world events and their relation to how predictions pan out.

Predicting the Prediction Markets

Despite legal hurdles, it seems that there’s no stopping prediction markets from becoming one of the most active on-chain activities. As per Bitget Wallet and Polymarket, last March alone, the monthly trading volume reached $25.7bn, with over 80% trading $10,000 or less. Another report, from Dune Analytics, arrived at the figure of $23.7bn. A number that’s somewhat smaller but still accounts for a $1.9bn increase compared to last year’s results.

The numbers indicate that prediction markets are moving away from episodic betting toward continuous patterns, signaling that users have become accustomed to the new system. And with both Polymarket and Kalshi now exceeding the $20bn valuation mark, prediction markets show no signs of stopping anytime soon. 

Experts are observing (and lawmakers fearing) that prediction markets may increasingly be used as a tool to aggregate information and gauge expectations. At the time of writing, one of Kalshi’s crypto predictions was 72% chance that Bitcoin will be $80,200 or above that day at 9am EDT. It sounded like a good betting opportunity. But the higher the percentage, the more confidence there is in the outcome, which only boosts the chances of it happening. 

Be that as it may, the platforms’ growth suggests that participants are engaging with these markets more consistently and with more confidence, despite regulatory uncertainties.