Bitcoin Loans

Kalshi, the first federally regulated prediction market exchange in the United States, has rapidly become one of the most significant players in the broader Bitcoin and cryptocurrency narrative. Founded in 2018 by co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour — an MIT graduate and former quantitative trader at Goldman Sachs and Citadel — Kalshi was built on a simple but powerful idea: that people should be able to trade directly on the outcomes of real-world events without relying on complex financial instruments. Under Mansour’s leadership, the company navigated a grueling regulatory battle with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission before securing approval as a Designated Contract Market, positioning itself at the intersection of traditional finance and the fast-moving crypto industry.

Bitcoin has become a cornerstone of Kalshi’s platform, both as a trading subject and as a financial tool for its users. Kalshi introduced Bitcoin deposits in early 2025, allowing users to fund their accounts directly from their wallets via a partnership with Zero Hash. Shortly after, the platform expanded to accept Solana, USDC, and other cryptocurrencies, with crypto deposits offering faster funding and higher deposit limits of up to $500,000. This move was a deliberate strategy to attract crypto-native users and increase participation in Kalshi’s over 50 Bitcoin-specific prediction markets, where traders can wager on price thresholds, legislative developments surrounding cryptocurrency, and major adoption milestones.

Perhaps the most dramatic development in Kalshi’s Bitcoin-related trajectory came in late 2025, when the platform launched tokenized versions of thousands of its prediction markets on the Solana blockchain. Kalshi’s head of crypto, John Wang, explained that this tokenization strategy was designed to tap into billions of dollars of on-chain liquidity, allow developers to build third-party applications on top of Kalshi’s markets, and help maintain competitive pricing against rivals like Polymarket. By integrating with Solana infrastructure providers Jupiter and DFlow, Kalshi aggregated its on-chain and off-chain liquidity into a single pool — a first for any prediction market in the world. Within days of launch, the platform had already surpassed $2.8 million in volume on Solana alone, underscoring the appetite among crypto traders for regulated, event-based trading.

CEO Tarek Mansour has been the driving force behind Kalshi’s aggressive expansion into the crypto space. Born in California and raised in Lebanon, Mansour returned to the United States to study at MIT, where he earned degrees in computer science and mathematics. His early career at elite financial firms gave him a keen understanding of how institutions use complex derivatives to approximate exposure to future events — a process he saw as unnecessarily cumbersome and expensive. That insight became the founding vision of Kalshi, and today it manifests in the platform’s crypto strategy. Mansour has also announced plans to host the inaugural Prediction Market Conference in March 2026, an event designed to bring together researchers, economists, policymakers, and traders to discuss governance, regulatory frameworks, and scalable use cases across crypto, asset management, and policy sectors.

The broader significance of Kalshi’s Bitcoin-related moves cannot be understated in the context of how prediction markets are maturing alongside the cryptocurrency industry. In 2025, Kalshi processed $23.8 billion in total notional volume — growth exceeding 1,100% year over year — and closed a $1 billion funding round that valued the company at $11 billion. The platform secured partnerships with CNN, CNBC, Coinbase, Phantom wallet, and even Google, which began integrating Kalshi prediction data into its search and finance platforms. As Bitcoin continues to oscillate between institutional enthusiasm and market volatility, Kalshi stands as a unique bridge: a place where traders can not only deposit and use Bitcoin as currency but also bet on its future with the backing of federal regulation. Under Mansour’s vision, Kalshi is not simply a prediction market that happens to involve crypto — it is becoming a defining force in how the world prices, trades around, and understands Bitcoin’s evolving role