Tarek Mansour · 40

Is it worth 40 billion US dollars to predict the market?

Source: Fintech Blueprint Author: Laurence Smith Compiled and collated: Is BitPushNews a sports betting or a new type of financial market? Kalshi is in the midst of a new round of funding. Just seven weeks after completing the $1 billion Series F round at a valuation of $22 billion, the Financial Times reports that the forecasting market operator is in negotiations at a valuation of around $40 billion and is likely to complete settlement in the third quarter as soon as possible. This is definitely breaking news! Additional background information: Kalshi's valuation in October last year was still $5 billion, reached $11 billion in December, and soared to $22 billion in May of this year. Achieving an 8x valuation reshaping in as little as 18 months is extremely rare. According to reports, the company is currently in negotiations with the bank on an IPO (initial public offering), and CEO Tarek Mansour said the IPO could take place after 2027. Background and current situation Many analysts talk about Kalshi and Polymarket, usually from a regulatory and market share perspective. This time, we want to explore something more essential: by running very different economic machines, the two companies ended up reaching a similar end — with a huge institutional shareholder roster and multi-billion dollar monthly trading volume. One charges about 1%, and the other has an annualized book revenue of $2 billion, and has no fees for the past five years. At the same time, Kalshi's business model is simple: it is an exchange regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and charges about 1% for every matched transaction. There is no bookmaker risk, and the balance sheet is not affected by the outcome of the transaction — it is simply taxed on trading volume, which has always performed amazingly. As of April 2026, its annualized transaction volume reached $178 billion, a 32-fold increase over the previous year, and the company's annualized revenue also surpassed $2 billion. Based on a $40 billion asking price valuation, this is approximately 20 times the market-sales ratio (P/S). Expensive, but not unjustifiably — Coinbase and Robinhood have traded at similar multiples. The last time we reported on these two companies, Kalshi's valuation was double that of Polymarket. Since then, this valuation ratio has hardly changed. But the real core issue is the quality of revenue. Are these platforms just huge online casinos, or are they a new type of business that is more deeply connected to the information and financial markets? For Kalshi, sports contracts account for around 65% of its trading volume, but that is also causing them trouble. The Kentucky lawsuit alleges that 89% of Kalshi's 2025 trading volume came from sports, which is the type of contract the states are trying to ban. Arizona filed criminal charges in March, a Massachusetts judge banned Kalshi's sports market in January, and Nevada extended its ban. The company's entire legal theory — that the incident contract is a swap (swap) contract subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the CFTC — is currently undergoing judicial proceedings in more than 10 US states at the same time, and a federal judge in Michigan recently ruled that the sports prediction market is not a swap. The dispute is heading to the Supreme Court, and the premise underpinning its overvaluation is that Kalshi must win this legal case. Kalshi has established a truly profitable market, but its economic benefits are entirely dependent on this legal classification. The 1% rate only makes sense if Kalshi remains the only federally approved compliant venue. However, DraftKings launched its own exchange this week, Robinhood has already entered the event contract space, and CME (CME) is also suing the CFTC over Kalshi's cryptocurrency perpetual contract. A triumph in court would lead to competition, which in turn would encroach on this 1% rate; failure in court directly threatens the trading volume base on which the fee is based. How to play Polymarket Polymarket takes the exact opposite strategy. In October of last year, when the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)...

39d agoWendy#IPOs #Kalshi #Polymarket #Tarek Mansour #valuations #Predicting the market #Forecast market topics

Kalshi CEO: Will not IPO in 2026, window or 2027-2028

Compared to Twitter, according to CNBC, prediction market platform Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour clarified in a recent interview that although the company is in the early stages of IPO planning, it will not go public in 2026, and the market's previous prediction of the 2027-2028 listing window seems more realistic. In response to market concerns about insider trading risks, Tarek Mansour responded that Kalshi has strengthened its compliance system, including strengthening KYC processes, checking traders' employer information, and filing lawsuits against suspected irregularities to enhance market transparency and trust.

59d ago

Kalshi CEO: Polymarket is not a major competitor, CME, Robinhood and DraftKings are a bigger threat

Comparing the news, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said in an interview with Front Office Sports that he does not see Polymarket as a major competitor, but is more concerned about the threat posed by CME Group, Robinhood, and sports betting operators. According to Bank of America analyst data, Kalshi accounts for about 91% of the US regulated forecast market, holds about $1 billion of the industry's approximately $1.6 billion outstanding contracts, and lists about 97% of the active market. Kalshi traded around $9.8 billion over the past 30 days, close to Polymarket's $9.9 billion. CME launched FanDuel Predicts in December last year; after building a prediction market based on the Kalshi exchange in 2025, Robinhood began switching some of its contracts to its Rothera platform in partnership with Susquehanna. Mansour called on Polymarket to be included in the regulatory framework, saying its offshore platform's insider trading cases hurt the entire industry. The CFTC issued a 267-page rule proposal on June 10 to allow multiple sports contracts but prohibit in-game betting and pre-college sports. The public comment period is 45 days.

65d ago

Kalshi CEO: When it comes to competitors, the first thing that comes to mind is not Polymarket, but platforms such as CME and Robinhood

Comparing the news, Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour said in an interview with FOX: “To be honest, when I think about competitors, it's not Polymarket that comes to mind, but some other platforms. We are being surrounded by a group of competitors. In a follow-up interview, Tarek mainly mentioned CME and Robinhood. The former helped gaming giant FanDuel launch its own prediction market product, and the latter has also launched its own prediction market Rothera. Additionally, Tarek mentioned DraftKings, Novig, and Coinbase.

65d ago

Kalshi's perpetual contract trading volume surpasses $5.5 billion, plans to expand asset classes other than crypto

Comparatively, according to Cryptonomist reports, the prediction market platform Kalshi's perpetual contract product was launched only two weeks ago, and the cumulative trading volume has exceeded 5.5 billion US dollars. The data shows that for three consecutive days, the platform's trading volume has exceeded $1 billion in a single day. Among them, major sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup and the NBA Finals have contributed significantly to the surge in transaction volume. Currently, Kalshi has launched 11 crypto-related perpetual contracts. Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour said it plans to expand perpetual contract products to asset classes other than crypto in the future.

66d ago

Kalshi co-creates Tarek Mansour: predicting the market's incentive is to find the truth

Comparing news, Kalshi's co-creator Tarek Mansour said while attending the podcast “When Shift Happens” on June 1 that the forecasting market is disrupting traditional media for two reasons: one is that it directly reaches the audience, there are no middlemen, and there are no filters; second, its incentive mechanism naturally points to the truth — betting on making money and betting on losing money by mistake, which traditional media cannot do.

80d ago

Kalshi CEO: The potential market size for large institutional risk transfer transactions could reach $10-15 trillion

Comparing news, in response to the first customized commodity transaction recently completed on the Kalshi platform, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said in an article on the X platform, “Historically, the bottleneck in institutional risk transfer has been liquidity. Liquidity bottlenecks are the lack of price benchmarks for each type of associated risk (such as WTI for oil). Kalshi has built a large community of the world's top hyperforecasters, who are at the forefront of the world in terms of risk pricing. This allows us to provide price benchmarks for a wider range of issues faced by people and institutions. Institutions have begun to adopt these price benchmarks by incorporating them into traditional asset pricing models. While there is still work to be done, we're seeing data use cases and integrations rapidly expand. The next stage is to use price benchmarks to transfer risk through bulk transactions and requests for quotations (RFQ). This phase is still early, but it's already taking shape. It is still difficult to estimate the size of the risk transfer market for non-traditional financial targets. The closest reference is the reinsurance market and the derivatives sector of banks: reinsurance of about $700 billion; insurance-related securities and parametric insurance (such as disaster bonds) of about $120-135 billion; and bank derivatives (structured products, trader-to-dealer, exotic products, etc.) of about $200-400 billion. The current market is around $1-1.5 trillion, but most of it is illiquid and over-the-counter (OTC, i.e. trading with a single counterparty). Every time the main OTC market shifts to exchange trading, the market grows significantly due to the establishment of price benchmarks, narrowing spreads, the end of the monopoly of Wall Street elites, and the entry of new players. Interest rate swaps increase 10-15 times, stock options increase 20-30 times, and energy derivatives increase 5-8 times. “Institutional use cases for forecasting markets could create a $10-15 trillion market with more upside, depending on the extent to which they democratize what is currently limited to Wall Street.”

116d ago

Kalshi completes first customized bulk transaction with liquidity provided by Jump

Comparing news, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour quoted Bloomberg reports on X as saying that Kalshi has completed the first customized block trade (block trade), of which Jump Trading provided liquidity support for the transaction. The deal was arranged by Greenlight Commodities this month and executed on behalf of a Houston-based environmental hedge fund that wants to get exposure to a contract that tracks “whether a specific price will be realized during California's May carbon quota auction.” In this regard, Mansour said that the institutional application of the forecast market is likely to be a $10-15 trillion market, and its growth potential may be greater, depending on the extent to which they have popularized products currently unique to Wall Street.

116d ago

1.72 million addresses are only 3.14% “real winners”. Predict how the market's money will be taken by a few people?

Translation: Wenser Original title: 10 Truths of Predictive Markets: Only 3.14% of Polymarket's 1.72 million addresses are “real winners” Editor's note: Polymarket, Kalshi, and other predictive market platforms have always defined themselves as “concentrated expressions of group intelligence” to distinguish themselves from quiz platforms and raise valuations by emphasizing this narrative. However, a recent paper from the London Business School and Yale University found that after disassembling data on the Polymarket chain, less than 4% of addresses drove price changes and actual profits were quite impressive, while the remaining 97% of addresses were mostly “runners”, and over 67% of people lost money. Considering that the number of Polymarket user addresses has already exceeded 2.43 million, the paper's research data may be lagging behind, but the phenomena behind its findings are still worth pondering. Fact 1: The accuracy of predicting the market has nothing to do with “group intelligence,” but rather a minority of 3.14% decided that this is the core conclusion of the entire paper, and it is also a direct challenge to the industry narrative. Previously, many industry representatives were proud of this: Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said that predicting the market “uses group intelligence,” and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has also repeatedly promoted “financial interests can gather information more effectively than experts,” and Robinhood CEO VovLad Tenev called it “capitalism's pursuit of truth.” However, research data tells us that out of 1.72 million Polymarket accounts, only about 54,000 accounts (3.14%) were identified as “skill winners” (Odily Planet Daily note: the paper summarizes this type of person as professional players who can both predict and absorb information on an average basis, and respond efficiently when news appears). The main driving force for predicting price discoveries in the market is this minority, not the crowd hiding behind “group intelligence” most of the time. Fact 2: Earning or losing money is probably luck. 67% of participants are essentially “philanthropists.” In this paper, Roberto Gómez-Cram and others used a set of sign-randomization statistics to divide all traders' accounts into four categories: skill winners (3.14%), lucky winners (29.0%), lucky losers (61.4%), and skill losers (6.4%). The most counterintuitive number is — the lucky winners account for nearly 30%. They make money, but their transactions don't contribute to price discovery; the statistical level is no different from random coin toss. In other words, making money in the forecasting market and “having the ability to predict the future” are two different things; the loser group, which accounts for about 67%, bears all losses, essentially paying for the information advantage of a few people. Fact 3: Top players in the profit list. 88% rely on luck to make money. Of the top 54,000 traders ranked by actual profit on Polymarket, only 12% were also identified as “skill winners” by statistical methods. In other words, the vast majority of big winners with large profits on the rankings depended on the luck of one or two big gamblers. One case in point is account @majorexploiter — over a weekend in early 2026, the account invested $4.5 million in three sporting events and made more than $3.6 million in profit. The return on this type of concentrated betting is extremely unsustainable, with 60% of “lucky winners” becoming losers in out-of-sample testing. Fact 4: The effectiveness of market forecasting skills far exceeds that of traditional fund industry paper researchers randomly divide betting events into training sets and test sets to verify outside of the sample. The results showed that 44% of the accounts identified as “skilled players” in the training set were still identified as “skilled users” in the test set; as a comparison, the US actively managed mutual fund conducted the same test, and the skill effectiveness was only 10%. Looking at it the other way around, “anti-skill” (continuous loss) is also highly consistent: 51% of the “skill losers” concentrated on training continued to maintain their status as losers in the test set, while the US Mutual Fund's figure rose to 20%. The final conclusion is that the best players in the prediction market are real experts, and chives are also real chives. Fact 5: Skilled winners' orders and final results are highly correlated. Researchers have calculated according to the constructed order imbalance formula that the net buying index (OIB) of skilled winners increases by 1%, the next issue...

117d agoburnking#Predicting the market

Kalshi CEO Publicly Invites Federal Prosecution: Self-Defense Game Amid Insider Trading Scandal

Author: Claude, Shenzhen TechFlow Original title: Kalshi CEO called for the US Department of Justice to sue for insider trading. Behind the initiative to “seek punishment” is a survival game Shenshao Guide: Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour made a public statement at the Semafor Global Economic Summit. It is expected that the US Department of Justice will file a criminal lawsuit against predicting market insider trading, saying “this is a federal crime.” This forecasting market giant, which is valued at $22 billion and has a weekly trading volume of over $1 billion, has launched 200 insider trading investigations in the past year. Kalshi is trying to distance itself from rival Polymarket by actively embracing enforcement in a scuffle pattern with at least 8 regulatory bills hanging over Congress and three states being sued by the federal government. The CEO of Kalshi, one of the biggest players in the prediction market, is publicly inviting federal prosecutors to take action against offenders on his platform. According to Semafor's April 15 report, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour stated at the Semafor Global Economic Summit that predicting insider trading in the market “is now a federal crime” and he expects the Department of Justice to file criminal charges in some cases. At the same time, he called for the establishment of a federal-level consumer protection framework to replace the current regulatory puzzle of individual states. This statement comes at a time when the forecasting market industry is facing a four-sided siege: congressional legislation, state government lawsuits, Department of Justice investigations, and insider trading scandals erupt one after another, and Kalshi and Polymarket, rivals valued at over $20 billion, are dealing with this regulatory storm with vastly different strategies. Mansour publicly shouted: “Insider trading is a federal crime.” Mansour's wording is quite straightforward. “If you do insider trading in Kalshi, it will become a federal crime at some point,” he said at the summit. It's a federal crime. I do expect the Department of Justice to prosecute some of these cases.” He added that Kalshi has the power to impose a range of penalties on violators, from fines to criminal referrals, and that the company has publicly disclosed some of the cases, and “more are coming soon.” Mansour also criticized the current state of regulation of forecasting markets in US states. He pointed out that out of 34 states that have legalized sports betting, only one state prohibits marketing promotion to problem gamblers, and this “patchwork” state-level regulatory system “has failed.” He advocated for the federal government to establish a unified consumer protection framework. The timing of this statement is quite strategic. On the same day as Mansour's speech, according to CNBC, Kalshi and Polymarket are ramping up their lobbying campaign in Washington. Together, the two companies invested nearly $1 million in federal lobbying in 2025, according to OpenSecrets data. Kalshi placed a large number of outdoor advertisements in Washington, D.C., and the slogans directly read “We prohibit insider trading,” “We do not do death markets,” and “We operate under the US legal framework.” The Department of Justice is already acting: The statement that the Southern District Attorney of New York interviewed PolyMarketMansour did not come out of thin air. According to CNN's exclusive report on March 30, the head of the securities and commodity fraud department at the Southern District of New York's federal attorney's office recently met with Polymarket representatives to discuss how current law applies to predicting potential misconduct in the market. Jay Clayton, the federal attorney for the Southern District of New York, had previously sent a clear signal at a securities enforcement forum in February. When asked if criminal charges related to predicting markets are expected, Clayton answered in the affirmative and stated “not because it is predictive markets will save you from fraud charges.” Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the Southern District of New York Attorney's Office, said in a statement to CNN that the office has clearly informed market participants that various laws, including insider trading laws, anti-money laundering laws, anti-manipulation laws, and various anti-fraud laws, are applicable to predicting the wide range of activities observed in the market. However, there is still legal uncertainty about the prospects for prosecution. Aitan Goelman, a former CFTC law enforcement director and current criminal defense attorney, told CNN that prosecutors not only need to prove that the trader carried out the transaction while holding material non-public information, but also proved that the transaction was contrary...

128d agoburnking#CEO #Kalshi #Polymarket #custodial #Predicting the market