Phantom Opens Kalshi Event Contracts to US Users at Two Cents

Phantom switched on Kalshi event contracts for its United States users on Friday. An event contract pays out on whether a stated outcome happens, Kalshi is the federally regulated exchange that lists them, and Phantom is the Solana wallet now selling access inside its own app, in a tab it calls Predict. Two cents a contract, with identity checks on Kalshi's side before anything trades. The rollout widens over the coming weeks. What a trade can be funded with is described differently by the three accounts of the launch read here.

Cash only, or cash and tokens

The Block, filing at 13:00 UTC on Friday, says trades are funded with CASH, Phantom's dollar-pegged stablecoin, through Phantom Cash accounts, and that winnings come back to the same place. FinanceFeeds, four hours later, says funding comes from a Cash balance or supported Solana tokens. The Crypto Times says the same and goes further into the mechanics: a Cash-funded trade is gasless, while a token-funded one needs SOL to cover network fees when a position opens, grows or closes. Two accounts against one. They do not reconcile, and nothing read here establishes whether the earlier description was narrower or simply incomplete. All three agree that payouts land in Phantom Cash and that Stripe processes them.

Two cents, described two ways

The fee total is not in dispute. Every account puts it at $0.02 a contract, and The Crypto Times works the arithmetic through: ten contracts cost twenty cents. The split is where the descriptions part. FinanceFeeds and The Crypto Times both break the two cents into a one-cent Phantom platform fee and a one-cent Kalshi exchange fee; The Block presents the whole two cents as Phantom's own charge on the feed. A variable network fee may also apply when funds move across to Kalshi, and no account gives an amount for it. Kalshi's volumes are large by The Block's count, above $291 billion traded in 2026 with October running at $55.33 billion and nine days still to go. Those are The Block's data and nobody else's.

What the CFTC told Phantom in March

Phantom is not registered as an introducing broker, the regulated middleman that routes customer orders to a derivatives venue. It does not have to be, for now. CFTC staff told the company in March they would not recommend enforcement over the missing registration, subject to conditions, where its software gives access to registered venues. The agency widened similar relief to qualifying passive software providers in September. FinanceFeeds is careful about what that is worth, calling it conditional staff no-action treatment and not a permanent statutory exemption. Phantom's general counsel put the company's position to The Block on Friday.

"So long as our interaction with these products is consistent with our no-action position, we are confident and comfortable," said Kevin Jacobs, Phantom's general counsel.

The map has holes in it

Not every market reaches every state. Sports contracts are blocked for users in Michigan, and both Nevada and Washington block wider sets of categories, Washington's being the longer list. Those blocks exist because states dispute Kalshi's argument that federal oversight shields its event contracts from state gambling law, and the appeals courts have split. One circuit affirmed the CFTC's authority over Kalshi contracts in April, by The Crypto Times' account; another found against the exchange in two states on whether its sports contracts are protected swaps, by the FinanceFeeds account. Neither holding has a second source here. Two firms sued Missouri this month over the same jurisdictional line while four named rivals stayed out of it, and the exchange has been reworking its own incentives under scrutiny of its crypto volumes. Phantom says it will comply with the state restrictions while the cases run and expects the Supreme Court to settle the question. No account read here gives a date for that.