Kalshi ropes-in Web3 influencer to head its crypto trajectory

Kalshi, the prediction market platform, is tapping into the influencer game to give a strategic direction to the trajectory of its crypto division. The New York-headquartered platform, this week, appointed crypto and Web3 influencer John Wang as the head of crypto. As per Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, this collaboration with Wang is him betting on the “slope” – which is about high quality thinking and “working mercilessly hard”.

Mansour confirmed Wang’s onboarding to the team through a late LinkedIn post on August 25.

“At every key hire, we chose the person whose trajectory had more growth over the person with more industry knowledge and a static trajectory. John is 23 years old. I can’t wait for us to tackle the roadmap we are putting together,” the Kalshi CEO said in his post.

Wang, an Australian by birth, has been part of the crypto circle for a while now. In 2022, he co-founded Armor Labs as a blockchain security firm. He has also been associated with other crypto projects like Paradign and Immutable. In 2024, he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to pursue crypto.

His communication with Mansour and other from the Kalshi team had been ongoing for over a month before his role into the company was finalized, his post on LinkedIn indicated.

“Started in 2018, Kalshi remains the pioneer of prediction markets. Its broker distribution strategy is massive, with Robinhood and Webull Financial only the beginning of a pipeline that includes nearly every major finance, fintech, social, gambling and news app. Kalshi has real penetration with mainstream users beyond crypto, strong financials with real paying customers, and structural liquidity advantages,” the influencer with over 44,000 followers on X said in his post.

Kalshi has already added crypto deposits for users as an alternative to bank deposits, debit cards and wire transfers while also having launched a crypto betting platform, letting users make predictions on the future prices of Bitcoin and Ether.

For now, elaborate details on Wang’s plans for Kalshi’s crypto division remains unclear. He did, however, indicidate that the platform has all it takes to become the next “Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)” — an extensive fintech conglomerate based in the U.S.

The addition of Wang to Kalshi’s team seems comes just weeks after the platform announced a partnership with Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI. Announcing this partnership in July, xAI had posted that two of America’s fastest growing companies were now on the same team.

As part of this teaming up, Kalshi integrated Musk’s Grok chatbot to generate AI summaries on topics trending on the prediction markets.