For many people, the first time they thought about Kalshi—a prediction market where you can place bets on the outcomes of sports, politics, culture, weather, and much more—was after a video clip of its cofounder, Tarek Mansour, went viral last week.
Speaking on stage at the Citadel Securities Future of Global Markets Conference, the moderator Molly O’Shea asked, “Tarek, you’ve mentioned multiple times that you think prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market. What is it going to take to become a $1 trillion asset class?” In response, Mansour said, “You know, ‘Kalshi’ is ‘everything’ in Arabic. The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion.” The market impact of a “general-purpose exchange” capable of settling differences of opinion, he added, would be “quite massive.”
With the launch of Kalshi in 2018, and its main competitor Polymarket in 2020, prediction markets have gone mainstream in a major way. The potential for making profit by owning the market where every opinion and event is financialized also explains why Kalshi has just raised another $1 billion in its third fundraising round this year alone. Investors are hungry for new ways to take advantage of the explosive rise of gambling, technologies that create addictive behavior loops, and economic conditions where people are desperate enough to bet their rent money on if Trump will release the Epstein Files.
Kalshi sits between Las Vegas and Wall Street. A platform like FanDuel helps you gamble on every aspect of a game, and a platform like Robinhood helps you day-trade with complex options—all while sitting on your couch. Kalshi is designed to take this same logic and apply it to everything imaginable.
This is a bizarre vision, one that views all the world as a casino and all its people as players. It treats the proliferation of sports betting as a model for all human interactions. It’s not enough to gamble on the outcome of a game. You should also be placing bets based on every opinion you have. (After all, do you really believe it’s going to be sunny today if you don’t put money on it?)
For Kalshi, holding these opinions to yourself deprives the world of another asset that can be exploited for financial gain.
Here’s how it works. As a prediction market, Kalshi lets you buy “events contracts” based on the outcome of events in the world. You either buy a YES contract or NO contract based on if you think the event will happen. The price of each contract changes based on the dynamic odds at the time.
