Kalshi is a legit trading platform, offering legal markets on a range of future events.
The short answer is yes, Kalshi is a legitimate prediction market platform that has emerged as an industry leader in the United States. Adding to its legitimacy is the fact that Kalshi is federally regulated and legally available in all 50 states.
If you follow the news, there is a good chance that you’ve heard about prediction markets, which give everyday people the ability to trade contracts on the outcome of a variety of future events. With prediction markets exchanges like Kalshi, people can buy contracts based on the likelihood of an outcome for a chance to win real money.
Sign up to Kalshi to start trading on prediction markets today.
Kalshi was co-founded in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. Mansour, Kalshi’s CEO, was inspired to develop the prediction market when he was a Goldman Sachs trader and wondered if there wasn’t a simpler way for businesses and institutions to hedge against Brexit to protect them from the potential financial fallout. Instead of costly and complex “financial bundles,” he thought it would be easier to purchase contracts predicting the likelihood of Brexit occurring. By “betting” that Brexit would occur, traders could receive a cash windfall to counter any ensuing financial damage.
Today, Kalshi is available throughout the United States to users 18 and older through its website and app, where users can buy or sell contracts related to a large number of event outcomes. Kalshi users can bet on everything from election outcomes and award winners to music and movie chart performances and even weather occurrences.
In 2024, Kalshi introduced sports markets in which users can put money on which teams would win playoff and championship series. In 2025, Kalshi began offering individual game markets, letting traders bet on the outcome of single football, basketball, baseball and other sports matches.
Prediction markets like Kalshi received widespread mainstream attention in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, which helped draw more traders to the platform. The odds at Kalshi and other prediction markets consistently favored Donald Trump to win and proved to be a more reliable indicator than most polls and pundits.
Kalshi is regulated on a federal level by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the United States’ primary regulator of derivatives markets that was established in 1974. The Commision is designed to protect the public from market manipulation and fraud.
In 2020, Kalshi became the first federally-regulated event outcome trading market when it received approval from the CFTC as an authorized Designated Contract Market (DCM).
Kalshi must abide by all rules and regulations set forth by the CFTC and must submit proposed new markets to the Commission for approval. The CFTC has disapproved of some Kalshi event contracts in the past, including the market related to future party control of Congress in 2023.
But the current CFTC is seen as being more friendly overall to Kalshi and other prediction markets. After he took office, President Trump nominated Kalshi board member Brian Quintenz to serve as the CFTC chair. Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi as a strategic adviser in early 2025.
Part of the reason for Kalshi’s success is how simple and user-friendly the platform is. To get started, you’ll need to sign up for a Kalshi account and have your identity verified, as required by the CFTC, by providing personal details like your social security number and uploading an image of the front and back of your government-issued photo ID.
Before buying event contracts, you’ll also need to fund your Kalshi account. You can deposit money and, if your predictions are successful, receive payments from Kalshi via your bank account, debit card or cryptocurrency wallet. Kalshi also accepts Apple Pay for deposits.
Once your account is funded, it’s time to choose from the hundreds of markets available at Kalshi. Within each market, you will be able to select “Yes” or “No” on the outcome of the event or you’ll be offered options to trade on. On the event pages you will see the odds for each market, shown as a percentage of likelihood.
For example, with a Kalshi market like “Will Miley Cyrus have a #1 hit this year?,” users can buy either “Yes” or “No.” You purchase the contracts, which will be between 1 and 99 cents each, depending on the odds. If the odds for “Yes” are 15%, each contract costs 15 cents. Those are longer odds, so if you bought $100 worth of “Yes” contracts and Cyrus has a No. 1 before the end of 2025, you would receive $560 once the market resolves.
In other Kalshi markets, such as ones related to who will win the next Super Bowl or who will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028, users are presented with multiple options and each selection will have “Yes” and “No” contracts.
A great feature of Kalshi is that it allows users to track how the odds in each market move in real time. The odds will often rise or drop in response to the latest news related to each market and the Kalshi tracker allows you at any time to buy or sell in response to the shifts.
Kalshi has strict security measures in place to protect any personal details you share. Kalshi stores your address, phone, email and social security number for regulatory purposes, as it could be subject to audit.
Kalshi encrypts all of that shared data when it is transmitted and stored. Kalshi says that all data is stored in a “separate, non isolated environment with strict access control … and tokenized so that as much data processing as possible is done with nonsensitive aliases.”
To process bank transactions, Kalshi uses Plaid, a safe, highly-trusted financial data network that is used by a wide range of sites and apps, including Venmo, Chime, Acorns and top legal gambling platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel. None of your financial information is stored by Kalshi.
As a federally regulated and approved trading exchange, you can rest assured your money and information is safe on the platform.
