Kalshi continues to expand its presence in the crypto industry, announcing its latest partnership with Pyth Network.
According to an announcement from Pyth, the partnership will allow blockchain developers to access real-time, regulated prediction market data onchain across 100+ blockchains. The goal? To unlock new financial products and applications by turning real-world event probabilities into programmable data.
The @PythNetwork oracle integration represents the first step in bringing Kalshi onchain
Now builders have a new tool at their disposal: Kalshi data, anywhere
Start building and join our builders program! https://t.co/TYylHchXRp
— Kalshi Ecosystem (@KalshiEco) October 13, 2025
While Kalshi’s Pyth integration is part of a broader effort to align itself more closely with the crypto-native world, it also highlights a deeper strategic push. Kalshi is no longer just partnering with crypto-native infrastructure; it is trying to position itself at the center of the on-chain prediction market economy, which has divided the crypto industry.
Kalshi continues to tap into the crypto space
The so-called “race” between Kalshi and Polymarket only seems to be intensifying as the CFTC-regulated prediction markets platform continues to expand its presence in the blockchain industry with a series of recent partnerships and hires.
The latest is Kalshi’s partnership with Pyth Network, a decentralized oracle providing real-time financial data.
Hedy Wang, CEO and co-founder of Block Street, the first unified liquidity layer and derivatives infrastructure for tokenized assets, called Kalshi’s recent partnership “huge.” Wang told Prediction News that so far, any onchain probability data was either synthetic or scraped from somewhere unreliable. The partnership is allowing builders to tap into legally verified market expectations.
“It’s like giving [decentralized finance] access to a live sentiment index for the real world. Developers can start building structured products, automated hedging tools, even dynamic [non-fungible tokens] that react to macro events, all based on actual market probabilities instead of vibes or Twitter predictions. It’s credible data, and that’s a massive shift.”
Last month, Kalshi announced another partnership with Solana and Coinbase’s Base to offer builders, traders, and creators grants that would push for the promotion of offchain and onchain innovation.
In addition to its latest series of partnerships, Kalshi also hired a few notable crypto influencers who are leading the platform’s expansion into the Web3 ecosystem.
In an interview with crypto publication The Block during Token2049, Kalshi’s new Head of Crypto, John Wang, shared his vision for the platform, noting that it will be on “every large crypto application and exchange” in the next year.
On October 7, a crypto influencer known as “ICOBeast.eth” on X, announced that they were also joining Kalshi to “help guide product and growth during a very formative time for the company.”
Kalshi crypto aspirations draw mixed reactions
As conversations around Kalshi’s efforts to integrate deeper into the crypto ecosystem continue to heat up, some experts have noted that the company’s crypto ambitions are not new. According to a Tweet published by Duncan Cock Foster, who was on the Kalshi YC hackathon in 2018, the company has been “immersed in crypto since day 1.”
Fun fact – I was on the @Kalshi YC hackathon team in 2018 (minute 12:20).
There is now debate about if @Kalshi is truly ‘crypto’. It definitely is – they’ve been immersed in crypto since day 1!
Congrats to @mansourtarek_ & @luanalopeslara on creating a generational company! https://t.co/ObzoYVY2y5
— Duncan Cock Foster (@dccockfoster) October 14, 2025
Block Street’s Wang added that Kalshi’s recent steps into crypto are “planting a flag.”
“Prediction markets have always had this ideological overlap with crypto, open access, transparency, and permissionless markets. By going onchain, Kalshi is positioning themselves as the truth engine for decentralized systems… they’re moving fast because whoever owns the data layer for event probabilities is going to own a big piece of the future financial stack. And to be fair, it’s kind of refreshing to see a regulated exchange take crypto seriously, not as a gimmick, but as infrastructure.”
Others, however, have pushed back, pointing out that Kalshi cannot be considered a crypto app due to its requirements for full Know Your Customer (KYC) verification. Kalshi’s KYC-heavy approach signals a more centralized, regulated model that some critics argue limits the openness and trustless nature that defines much of the crypto space. This has led to questions about whether the platform’s recent momentum stems more from marketing efforts than from genuine adoption by the crypto-native community.
Some cryptocurrency experts also view Kalshi’s approach as fundamentally out of step with the direction crypto-native predictions markets are headed. Notably Polymarket.
Speaking with Prediction News, Andreas Brekken, founder Sideshift AI, a direct-to-wallet cryptocurrency exchange, argued that the real promise of crypto prediction markets lies not just in transparency and decentralization, but in their ability to reshape real-world outcomes by enabling complex, combinatorial bets that challenge the status quo.
According to Brekken, the final form of prediction markets should allow users to bet on combinations like “’Kamala is elected and BTC price falls’ or ‘France leaves EU and its GDP goes up’ or ‘Ocean plastic removed and global cancer rates decrease.’” Instead, he noted that Kalshi, because it is regulated by the CFTC will still highly rely on offering markets that the CFTC “allows.”
While Kalshi, and soon Polymarket US, are beholden to CFTC regulations, it’s unclear at this point how far prediction market exchanges might be able to stretch the limits of what they can offer to American customers, and how crypto will play into their US-facing products.
