Kalshi高管：加密为第二大业务，拟通过合规嵌入全球扩张

Bankless Nation. I'm here with John Wang from Khi. John, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

John, is Koshi a crypto company?

Uh, I think so. Yeah, I think in the crypto world like there's obviously an onchain definition of like onchain or crypto company. Um, I don't think we're on chain company by any means. Uh, and there are onchain prediction markets out there for sure. Um but uh crypto is our second largest business line behind sports. Um we have 90% market share in the crypto predictions world. Um we uh a lot of our like biggest you know partners are in the crypto industry like Coinbase um Robin Hood crypto like Phantom um and some others. uh they route their orders and trades through us and so I think we're pretty deeply embedded in the industry and um that's pretty much what my role is is you know to help us get get even deeper.

Okay. So crypto is like there's the cryptosphere of influence and I think what you're saying is Khi is somewhat inside the cryptosphere of influence in a number of different ways but you're distinguishing it from Kelshi is not an onchain company. Does Kelshi want to be an onchain company? Um, ultimately we just want to build like products that are super easy to use and accessible to people. Um, like normal people that don't necessarily aren't necessarily like super experts in crypto.

Um, and so uh, our approach has always been to like go the regulated route and I think US regulations are heading more towards being on chain. Um, you know, with all the different like legislature that's coming out. Um but uh at the current state of US regulations like it's it's not compatible. Um I think in you know several years I that's somewhere where we want to get to. Um but product wise I think the products that we've been building um have been either like you know around trading crypto for example the largest crypto companies in the world I would say are like Binance, Coinbase, Kraken um these centralized exchanges they are all about allowing their users to trade the price of crypto and uh that's pretty much what our crypto prediction markets offer to our users.

Um we also have our new regulated per offering which is the first regulated perpetual futures exchange in the US. Um that's like the first time essentially you have a per app on the app store. You have um you know legal novpn access for normal US users. Um kind of like your your your mom, your cousin um even like uh your friend could access it. and also US institutions like comp can compliantly access it via like the type of infrastructure that they utilize.

Um also I think like the deposits and withdrawals aspects of being like a centralized exchange is a large reason why many people still use centralized exchanges. Um and for us crypto is an important rail uh for depositing and withdrawing from the platform. So obviously we have like the ability to just you know deposit and withdraw uh stable coins or crypto assets um in the US but internationally we're open in 140 countries.

The crypto rail is the only rail that we currently accept um for people to come into platform uh put their money in because we found it's the most frictionless way to get like you know global monetary access um and sort of uh the the most frictionless way to convert from you know the local currency to the actual US dollar that we accept.

I see. I see. So the for Cali to accept international customers, the only on-ramp that's viable and easy to integrate is like the stable coin or yeah local local stablecoin local fiat stable coin onramp into into Kelshi. H how much of Kelshi's businesses business volume and trading volume is from outside of the US? Like how dominant is that side of Keli? Yeah, we're still predominantly a US company um in terms of user base, but uh I think the international side is a huge focus of ours.

Um we are taking a somewhat unique approach there which is obviously like even in the US there's there's these two paths to growing a prediction market you know six seven years ago which is you go offshore and um you kind of take the unregulated route or you go onshore and work with the regulators in the US um and kind of like that's like the really hard hard path right like spending years just doing legal stuff um while like shipping a product in beta and not even being able to you know market it and such.

So we're kind of taking a similar long long-term approach to our international markets as well where we're working with like either the regulators or like the largest brokers in each country um uh to to sort of embed our prediction markets inside their products similar to how we've been embedding them into Robin Hood or Coinbase. And so we've been able to secure deals with like Wealth Simple in Canada or like XP, which is the largest broker in Brazil.

So overnight, like it's the long game, but overnight we can essentially unlock like uh the entirety of like a country's tradable like trader user base um if we get some of these partnerships. But we're also doing a lot of like um on the ground efforts to to try and um you know find a dialogue with each individual regulator. As Ryan and I have watched the growth of prediction markets, we have frequently used the comparison between Kelshi and Poly Market as kind of like Tether and Circle.

You have the compliant onchain onshore version, which is the circle, you know, it wants to work with the regulators, be very compliant. That's kind of the structural edge that Circle has. And and then there's Tether, which is kind of like playing in the offshore Euro dollar world, which is a very big world. And uh Tether has been able to grown actually grow pretty aggressively because it's actually not onshore and because it's not really constrained by the regulations.

And we kind of took that same growth story between the two largest stable coins, Circle and Tether, and we kind of have applied them similarly to the prediction markets between Kali, the onore version, and Poly Market, the the offshore version. Do you think that that is an accurate comparison? And uh where do you think that comparison or or yeah that comparison breaks down if it does?

Yeah. Well um it's it's always good to uh have some analogies to like reason across but I think with stable coins in particular it's um the product ultimately is like selling the US dollar. Um and there's a much greater product market fit or like need for the US dollar at least historically in like these third world country nations or offshore countries. So I think tether has just f like found a greater pain point for the customer. um and therefore like their growth internationally has been quite astron astronomical.

Um whereas with prediction markets I think it's less about like um you know we're shipping something that is like uscentric to the rest of the world. It's more about like each country and each type of really just group of people they have different questions about the world that they care about. And ultimately um all our markets are just about creating like the types of relevant events and markets that people want to trade.

Um and so obviously both uh like all the leading prediction markets in the world right now have mostly had US teams that are like focused on creating US specific markets. We found like um even some of our like uh markets in certain like whether it be like cricket um good great adoption internationally um the world cup was great for international adoption um crypto has been actually quite a strong like uh you know everyone in the world knows about bitcoin everyone in the world knows about ETH and so that's also crossed a lot of borders so Um, no I don't I don't think it's exactly a one to well it's not the I think the analogy breaks down in terms of like what the product actually is but in terms of the approach I think um yeah could be somewhat similar although I think we are like compared to like most regulated companies like a Coin