Kalshi Review

Kalshi is relatively limited with its incentives and promotions, but we found that it’s what suits the platform’s design well. While there’s a decent new trade bonus available, there are separate volume and liquidity incentives, and if you refer Kalshi to someone, both parties get a bonus amount for their participation. Here’s what Kalshi offers its new and existing players as incentives and promotions.

New Trader Bonus

Kalshi offers a deposit-match bonus, where users who make their first trade with $10 will receive another $10 as a bonus. To get this offer, apply the promo code SPKALSHI when making your first trade. While this is not a massive welcome offer, it’s decent enough considering that both the deposit and the trading requirement are quite low, meaning beginners won’t feel like they’re being forced into a massive commitment at Kalshi.

It’s important to note that you’ll have to complete your account verification before obtaining this bonus, but as soon as you make your first trade and use the promo code, you’ll get the bonus added to your account balance.

Other Promotions

Following the welcome offer, Kalshi offers a few incentive programs for volume and liquidity trading. These sorts of incentives are relatively common across US event prediction markets, especially when event-specific boosts and similar offers are concerned.

Kalshi doesn’t have incentives and promotions that traditional sportsbooks do. Since it’s a prediction market platform, Kalshi offers its Volume and Liquidity incentive programs, where contributing to either leads to cash, merch, or compute prizes. If the list of incentives seems a bit slim to you, luckily, the platform offers additional benefits as part of its VIP program.

The platform’s VIP program, Kalshi Platinum, once again, functions differently from those of online casinos or sportsbooks. You won’t find anything like publicly known tiers of the program or a way to find it on the platform’s site, since it’s an invite-only program aimed at high-volume players. Here’s what Kalshi’s VIP Program entails.

• Dedicated account manager
• Tickets to Kalshi events and dinners
• Exclusive merchandise
• Priority support

Compared to other leading prediction market platforms, Kalshi has its own fee model, where instead of fully relying on blockchain gas, the platform uses a dedicated formula and a probability-based model. Thus, the platform functions as a financial exchange.

The fees essentially come from how close to a coin toss the event you’re betting on is. Fees peak when the odds are 50/50 ($0.50 odds) and drop significantly when the contract is close to either extreme ($0.01 or $0.99). Other than that, there are platform fees for certain payment methods, and gas fees still apply to crypto deposits and withdrawals.

Market Categories & Liquidity

Kalshi offers access to a diverse set of markets for prediction, which include sports, cryptocurrencies, politics, finance, economics, weather, culture, climate, technology, and more. As we reviewed the prediction market platform, we found that sports usually drive the most liquidity, with more than 36,000 markets active within a 24-hour span on average.

Among the strongest markets are sports, in part due to sports event contracts, cryptocurrencies, and politics, and all settlements depend on the contract, where each market has a source in its rules. An ideal example would be the use of the Commodity Futures Benchmarks Real-Time Indices, while weather markets would use official weather data as the source.

Politics & Elections

While reviewing, we found an accessible, though large, section for politics and elections. However, it’s definitely not the biggest category on the platform, where 13,000+ averaged about $3 million in volume in a 24-hour window.

In terms of variety, the election and political prediction markets on Kalshi focus on elections, Congress, courts, international politics, local politics, government policy, and other trend-driven political events. In our experience, it’s one of the trickier categories on Kalshi, where volume only spikes during major news events, but legal, policy, and other markets tend to have wider spreads and lighter order books.

Crypto & Financials

Kalshi features the crypto, finance, and economics categories, where crypto occupies the largest chunk of the platform’s liquidity. With its $84 million average volume in a 24-hour window across 5,600+ markets, it stands out as the second-largest category on Kalshi, where crypto prediction markets across assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Solana, and more set the trends.

We found that compared to the finance and economics categories, crypto is a significantly easier category for users to approach, because the entire market criteria is price fluctuation. While finance makes up about $1.3 million in 24-hour trading volume across 1,300+ markets, economics occupies a slightly bigger chunk with $1.4 million across 3,400+ markets. As is the case with financial and economic prediction markets, users in these categories mainly focus on job data, inflation, federal rates, commodities, stock indices, recession markets, and more.

Sports and Pop Culture

With around $313 million in 24-hour volume across 36,900+ markets, sports is the biggest category on Kalshi, where we found that users access markets across soccer, baseball, tennis, basketball, football, MMA, golf, cricket, and esports. Along with futures, match outcomes, props, totals, spreads, and World Cup markets tend to be popular contracts across Kalshi.

We found that “sports” is the easiest category to approach, although Kalshi still works through event contracts instead of sportsbook odds. Users can buy and sell positions before settlement, which gives the category a more trading-led feel. Liquidity is also more reliable here than in most other categories, especially around major games, tournament futures, and popular player or team markets.

Pop culture is available too, but it plays a smaller role in Kalshi’s overall activity. With around $1.8 million in 24-hour volume across 7,700+ markets, the culture category has decent variety but weaker liquidity than sports and crypto. Users can find markets around entertainment, music, streaming, apps, awards, public appearances, and media events, and like most regulated event contract platforms, these markets tend to perform best when tied to major public moments.

Weather, Climate, and Other Markets

Kalshi also features weather, climate, tech, world, and miscellaneous event markets, which help the platform feel broader than just sports, crypto, and politics. Weather is the most active of these smaller categories, with around $1 million in 24-hour volume across 1,100+ markets. These contracts are generally easier to understand because the outcomes are tied to measurable conditions, such as temperature, rainfall, snowfall, or other weather results.

We found that weather markets have a practical edge because they are based on clear settlement criteria, but they do not carry the same liquidity as sports or crypto. Climate markets can be more long-term, covering topics such as temperature records, climate targets, or global warming thresholds, so they may suit users who are comfortable holding positions for longer periods.

The other smaller categories are more limited in terms of liquidity. Tech accounts for around $702,000 in 24-hour volume across 1,100+ markets, while miscellaneous markets sit at about $317,000 across 600+ markets. World and geopolitics markets are thinner still, with around $56,000 in 24-hour volume across 160+ markets. These categories add variety to Kalshi, but users should check the order book carefully before trading, as spreads and available volume can vary sharply.

The prediction market platform offers plenty of payment methods for US users, including bank transfers/ACH, e-wallets like Venmo, and a range of cryptocurrencies. We found that some deposits tend to process faster than others, such as ACH deposits taking up to 5 business days to process, while crypto transfers are processed within 30 minutes. One great benefit of deposits on Kalshi is that there’s not really any high cap, but for unusually large amounts, a verification by the platform is triggered.

Withdrawing Settled Funds

When the market has settled and the funds are available on the user’s cash balance, they’re considered settled funds and thus can be withdrawn. During our review, we found that Kalshi allows winning contracts to be paid out within a few hours after the outcome becomes known.

The process for withdrawal is relatively simple, and it is as follows:

1. Wait for your winnings to reflect in your cash balance.
2. Open the Manage Funds section.
3. Select Withdraw from Kalshi.
4. Choose your preferred withdrawal method.
5. Select the account/wallet where you want the funds to be sent.
6. Enter the withdrawal amount and confirm the transaction.

Kalshi works on iOS, Android, and mobile browsers, so traders have a few options other than accessing the site on desktop. The app is perhaps the most convenient means of using the platform, where users can browse markets, check Yes/No prices, place trades, track open positions, and review settled outcomes. We also appreciate how conscious of the user experience the design is, since prediction markets with high volume tend to move relatively quickly.

On mobile, the platform is useful but not completely casual. It is easy enough to check prices and place trades, but users still need to understand the order book, bid/ask movement, market rules, and settlement source before entering a position. There’s pretty much nothing else that we would want to see in the mobile app, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Kalshi, as a whole, is one of the most well-designed platforms we’ve found, and given the amount of traction it gets, anything less would not be sustainable. The curation of design comes through with how easy it is for users to browse markets through topics, find specific contracts, browse and post on the platform’s social section, or register on the platform.

There’s a lot of detail when it comes to markets, where each contract comes with Yes/No prices, trading volume, market rules, settlement criteria, and an order book. The order book is where new users will face the most difficulty, where you’d have to keep close attention to bid/ask prices, available liquidity, open orders, and potential payout. That learning curve is met relatively quickly, as we noted during our review, and the overall user experience is mostly positive in our eyes as well.

Kalshi was founded in 2018, but its public beta was opened on July 26, 2021. While the prediction market exchange is handled by KalshiEX LLC, the clearance of contracts and settlements is handled by Kalshi Klear LLC. Before going public, KalshiEX was deemed a federally regulated body, receiving regulation from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The prediction market exchange is available across some US states, but registration is subject to verification of identity, residency rules, and the Kalshi Member Agreement. In terms of market fairness, Kalshi opts for dedicatedly written settlement rules for every single contract, and the contracts are backed by authentic sources, such as government reports, weather agencies, financial benchmarks, and more.

Kalshi offers multiple customer support options to users, including support email and live chat. We’d recommend the live chat as a reasonable means of conflict resolution because, while it is still fronted by an AI agent, any need to escalate the matter to a human agent doesn’t take much effort on the user’s part.

In the email support note, users are highly encouraged to create comprehensive accounts of what they face and use screenshots or screen recordings to get ideal solutions. There’s also a Discord community, where users can discuss ideas and their own experience on the platform, but the official channels are best for settling any issues.