Kalshi has announced that they will now accept deposits in USD Coin (USDC), a widely-used stablecoin, as they compete for users in the run-up to the United States’ November elections. This was confirmed by the company on October 28th. Cryptocurrency deposits will be available soon, and the offramping will be handled by ZeroHash, a cryptocurrency payments platform, as reported by Fortune magazine.
There is growing competition among political betting platforms, with the Web3 platform Polymarket currently leading the pack, and competitors such as Kalshi are working hard to keep up.
On October 7th, Kalshi added event contracts for betting on the US election outcomes following a court battle in September. This made Kalshi the first election prediction market to be allowed to operate in the US, opening the door for other platforms like Polymarket to follow suit. On October 28th, Robinhood, a cryptocurrency and stock trading platform, also announced that it had introduced contracts for certain users to bet on the outcome of the presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump.
As of October 23rd, Polymarket’s website indicated that there was approximately $2.6 billion riding on the outcome of the November presidential election. Meanwhile, Kalshi’s flagship market, “Who will win the Presidential election?”, has accumulated nearly $87 million in total betting volume since it was listed on October 7th, according to their website.
While US regulators have expressed concerns that platforms like Kalshi threaten the integrity of elections, industry analysts argue that prediction markets often provide a more accurate reflection of public sentiment than traditional polls.
Both Polymarket and Kalshi are favoring former President Trump to win the presidency, with the platforms giving him odds of 62% and 66% respectively, as of October 28th. The November election will see Trump, who has expressed his aspiration to make America “the crypto capital of the world,” facing off against Harris, who has been relatively reserved on the subject.
According to Matthew Sigel, VanEck’s head of digital assets research, Bitcoin’s (BTC) performance is setting up a “very bullish setup” for the digital asset as investors prepare for the election, CNBC reported on October 28th.