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Kalshi is no longer trying to just carve out a space for itself. It wants to go head-to-head with the U.S. stock market.
Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, made that very clear on Tuesday during the Futures Industry Association’s Expo in Chicago. “This is starting to look like a trillion-dollar market,” he said. “I always thought it was going to be pretty fast and go pretty big. I just didn’t think that fast.”
This whole shift kicked into overdrive after Kalshi beat U.S. regulators in court last year, giving it the legal green light to let people trade contracts on the outcome of the next presidential election.
Since that win, things have moved faster than even Tarek expected. He originally thought it’d take a full decade for prediction markets to catch up to traditional equities, but Kalshi has already built what he calls “a whole class of active traders.”
Kalshi adds news and sports to fuel rapid growth
Kalshi didn’t stop at politics. The firm started offering new markets tied to sports, pop culture, and other current events, using its special regulatory setup to slip through cracks in states where sports betting is either banned or heavily restricted.
Tarek says more sports-related deals are coming soon. “I think prediction market is going to be embedded very smoothly, very effectively in the news,” he said, adding that major media partnerships are also in the pipeline, though he didn’t name any outlets.
What separates Kalshi from typical betting platforms is how the bets work. Instead of placing odds like a sportsbook, Kalshi sets up binary questions, yes or no outcomes, and lets users trade both sides of the prediction like a financial contract. This creates a kind of tug-of-war between users instead of the house-versus-you model.
Tarek insists that makes it not gambling at all. “While the house always wins in gambling, prediction markets provide a more level playing field,” he said. But not everyone’s buying it.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is still on Kalshi’s side, giving the exchange regulatory cover to continue operations. But some state-level gambling watchdogs have ordered Kalshi to shut down. And courts in some states have already ruled against it, threatening the company’s national expansion.
Tarek admitted there’s always been “weird tension with gambling” in new financial innovations, especially in derivatives. That tension hasn’t gone away, if anything, it’s heating up.
Wall Street steps in as rivals circle Kalshi
It’s not just state regulators Kalshi has to deal with. Gambling firms are coming for the same users, and industry insiders say Kalshi and other prediction exchanges might struggle to compete with more mainstream betting products.
Even so, Wall Street is starting to circle the space.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, is putting up to $2 billion into Polymarket, Kalshi’s biggest rival.
Meanwhile, CME Group is building a new app with Flutter Entertainment, mixing sports bets with financial data contracts.
Tarek says he’s fine with competition. He believes it’ll push the industry forward faster. Kalshi’s trading volume is booming, especially after teaming up with Robinhood, where users can now access its contracts directly. Its own platform has also seen a spike, mostly driven by sports-related wagers.
Looking ahead, Tarek says Kalshi will go global. The company is planning to launch in multiple countries over the next 18 months, betting big on what it sees as unstoppable momentum.
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