Kalshi's $400 million-plus monthly commodity trade volume outpaces early crypto growth

Sept 8 (Reuters) - Prediction market ‌startup Kalshi said ​on ​Tuesday monthly commodities trading volume on its platform was four times that of cryptocurrency at the same point, seven months ‌after launch.

Here are more details:

• Commodities trading reached more than $400 ⁠million of monthly volume, the company said.

• Boom in retail trading pushed Kalshi to ‌adopt commodity prediction markets in ‌products such as oil, gas and metals.

• The strong performance showcasing appetite for these contracts has helped the prediction market to explore ​newer asset classes, boosting trading volumes.

• "Crypto demonstrated the potential for new categories to scale from tens of millions to billions in monthly ⁠volume. Commodities' significantly faster ramp demonstrates that Kalshi's ability to launch and scale new markets is ​accelerating," it said.

• Kalshi raked in revenue windfall and recorded trading volumes much higher than what it had estimated ​from the 2026 FIFA World Cup partnership.

• ‌In an interview with Reuters, Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour said the commodities trading business had benefited from improved ⁠liquidity on the platform.

• "Liquidity is very hard to get off the ground because of how many people you need participating actively, so that every time you ⁠come to Kalshi and you want to enter into a position, you can enter ​it, and whenever you want to exit at that position, you can exit it," Mansour said.

• "Now we got there because of this diverse and large participation pool, ‌and that lets us essentially start new categories much faster."

• The company is also rapidly exploring perpetual future ‌contracts across asset classes, having filed for equity indexes, metals and WTI crude ⁠oil, after such investment vehicles ‌for cryptocurrency were green-lighted ​by regulators earlier in the year.

(Reporting by Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru and Anirban Sen in New York; Editing by ‌Shilpi Majumdar)

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