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)

((Pritam.Biswas@thomsonreuters.com;))