Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange where you trade yes/no contracts on real-world events: will the Fed cut rates, will it rain in Chicago tomorrow, will a team win the game. Here's what it actually is, how it works, what's legal, and how it makes money.
Kalshi is an exchange, in the same regulatory family as a futures exchange, where the "products" are yes/no contracts on the outcome of a real-world event: a Fed decision, an election, a game, a temperature. It was founded in 2018 by two MIT graduates, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, who wanted a regulated, transparent way to trade on the outcome of events. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) licensed it as a Designated Contract Market in November 2020, and it opened to the public in July 2021.
That regulatory status is what separates it from an offshore betting site or a crypto-only platform: Kalshi answers to the same federal body that oversees exchanges like the CME.
Every market on Kalshi boils down to one yes/no question. Contracts trade somewhere between 1 cent and 99 cents, and that price is the market's live, crowd-set estimate of the odds: a contract at 70 cents implies the crowd thinks there's roughly a 70% chance of YES.
You can buy or sell at any point before the market closes, the same way you'd trade a stock. When the event resolves, correct contracts pay out $1 each and incorrect ones pay $0. In between, the price just moves with the news and the crowd's changing view.
Markets span a handful of categories: sports (by far the largest share of activity), politics and elections, economics and Fed policy, weather, crypto price levels, and the occasional culture or awards market.
Yes, and this part is settled: Kalshi is federally regulated by the CFTC as a Designated Contract Market, the same designation that lets an exchange list and self-certify contracts under the Commodity Exchange Act. That's not a gray area or a loophole; it's a real federal license.
What's genuinely unsettled is a narrower fight over sports event contracts specifically. Several states argue those contracts are just sports betting wearing an exchange's clothes and have tried to restrict them under state gambling law. A federal appeals court has sided with Kalshi, ruling that federal law preempts state gambling law for CFTC-regulated markets, but that ruling only binds courts in its own circuit, so other states and courts haven't necessarily settled the same way. If you're trading sports markets specifically, the legal ground can vary by state and is still moving; non-sports markets aren't caught up in that particular dispute.
Structurally, yes: it's overseen by the CFTC, requires identity verification to open an account (similar to opening a brokerage account), and uses standard protections like encryption and two-factor authentication. That's a materially different trust model than an unregulated offshore site.
For anything account-specific (deposits, withdrawals, verification issues), that's a question for Kalshi's own help center, not this site. KalshiAPI only touches Kalshi's public market data, not its trading or custody systems.
Mainly three ways. First, per-trade fees: taker (market) orders carry a small fee that's highest when a contract is priced near 50 cents (maximum uncertainty) and shrinks as the price moves toward the edges, while maker (limit) orders are often fee-free to encourage liquidity. Second, interest on customer cash sitting in accounts, the same "float income" model brokerages like Robinhood or Schwab use. Third, a growing line of business licensing its market data to funds and research desks that treat Kalshi prices as a real-time signal.
They're often mentioned together, but they're built differently. Kalshi is a direct-access, CFTC-regulated exchange aimed at a mainstream US audience, with straightforward signup and strong depth on US sports and news markets. Polymarket grew out of crypto, offers US access through intermediaries rather than direct registration, and tends to lead on politics and global events with faster-moving, more speculative market creation. Fee models differ too: Kalshi's fees scale with a contract's price, while Polymarket typically charges a flat taker fee. Neither is strictly "better"; they suit different markets and different comfort levels with crypto.
Kalshi publishes its own market data through its own API, covering live prices, historical candles, and individual trades. That's the raw material behind everything above: the "26% of Crypto markets resolve YES" kind of stat, or a team's real win rate versus what the market was pricing.
KalshiAPI packages that same public market data (2.9M+ markets, hourly candles back to 2023, plus recent-months trade-level history) into an easier dataset to pull in bulk or query directly, including full historical downloads that Kalshi's own API doesn't offer. If you're curious what these markets actually look like or want to build something on top of them, that's what the rest of this site, and the two guides below, are for.