Five Interesting Things Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour Said At Solana Accelerate

Kalshi is focused on integrating prediction markets in "mainstream financial brokerages" alongside 401(k)s and "places where people keep their money...and their paychecks."

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour appeared at two different conferences in the past week. At the Solana Accelerate event last week, he said a number of interesting things, ranging from Kalshi’s penetration into financial brokerages, the speed of Kalshi’s growth, and the mix of what people are trading right now.

You can watch Mansour’s interview here for yourself, but I’ll break out the things I found most interesting below:

1. ‘A dozen brokers in the pipeline’ … and the idea of prediction markets living where people have 401(k)s and their paychecks

“So we have a few brokers launched and we have a dozen in the pipeline now… So we have Robinhood and Webull live and a few other smaller brokers. I think by the end of the year, I think we're projecting another maybe five to six brokers, and I think within the next year and a half I would say most mainstream financial brokerages like where you have your 401(k)s and others will have access to Kalshi’s products or prediction markets in app. …

…but this adoption of prediction markets and the places where people keep their money and go to to sort of check their balances and their paychecks and so on and so forth, and I think that's a critical step for us, and the results this year have been showing the growth has been really really astronomical.”

Two interesting things out of this bit of the interview:

• The pace of Kalshi’s integration with brokerages is astounding, if Mansour isn’t overselling. A dozen already in progress? In most brokerages by the end of next year? If those metrics are hit, Kalshi will be on a trajectory to the moon. Of course, there’s some devil in the details here; how many of Kalshi’s markets will be in those brokerages, will they include sports, and will brokers actually adopt across the board? But it is still mind-numbing if Kalshi can achieve this level of penetration into the financial system.

• Mansour and Kalshi seem enamored with the idea that prediction markets should live wherever people keep their money. A prediction market where you have your 401(k)? Where your paycheck is deposited? To me, this feels like a terrible idea. Yes, some of the markets Kalshi offers are legitimate markets that can be used to hedge and have economic impacts. But some of it is pure gambling/speculation that doesn’t belong in a financial platform (ie betting on who will win a game, what words Trump will say in his next speech, etc.). If this is where prediction markets are headed, I hope everyone thinks through the impacts and exercises some care in how all this works. If it’s limited, I am all for it. If it’s a sportsbook inside a brokerage, pass. I wrote about this topic a while back:
  

• For the record, Kalshi told me: “There are zero plans on our end to make prediction markets accessible via 401(k)s.” So you won’t be able to bet moneylines in your actual 401(k)s; I guess that’s something.

2. ‘The fastest growing company in America’?

“So I think this year we're going to end up doing — I don't really know, the rate of growth is so fast that I'm not able to project anymore … but the way I'll put it is I think Kalshi is safely one of the fastest growing companies in America today and by the end of the year we may be the fastest growing company in America.”

I might take the under on the last assertion, but he could end up being right, if things go well.

3. Kalshi trading is now ‘a mix across the board between politics, economics and financials, sports and… culture’

When asked about what people trade at Kalshi right now, here’s what Mansour said:

“Now, I think we see kind of a mix across the board between politics, economics and financials, sports and then one of our really fast growing categories: culture so … it's a completely new category of people that never sort of bet or trade on anything but they have views about like music and pop culture and so on and so forth and that's sort of a very fast growing segment.”

It’s interesting to classify it as a mix, as publicly available data from Kalshi makes it clear that right now trading is dominated by sports. A report at InGame notes that 70% of all trading at the platform has come on sports since those markets launched earlier this year. My weekly tracking shows that sports is almost always a majority of trading, and eclipsed 80% just last week.

So, is it a mix? Not really. It’s sports, and then there’s everything else. I find it interesting that Mansour sidesteps that reality.

It’s also noteworthy that he uses the “bet” terminology, even though he insisted that "I just don't really know what this has to do with gambling” in an interview just last month. I’ll keep pointing this out until everyone gets tired of me doing so, and then I’ll do it some more.

4. An ‘excruciatingly long journey’

“We were kind of alone in this sort of regulatory fight, so when we first started the company we realized like this is illegal, the US government did not want these to be in the US and so we had to go through this sort of excruciatingly long journey. I mean it was really three to three years and a half of convincing policymakers and the regulators to let us sort of do this in the US in a regulated and legal way and people ask a lot ‘What was the secret sauce?’ i mean it really was sort of relentlessness, if you do something for long enough at some point you create enough of a movement and momentum around you that people start believing you and then the more people start believing you, they become evangelists.”

Hat tip to Steve Ruddock and his Substack for pointing this one out and poking some fun at the idea that Kalshi has been fighting forever.

We have sometimes measured the progress of gambling expansions in decades, even though it has sped up in recent years.

But the legal fight to legalize sports betting via New Jersey’s court cases lasted more than six years. Some states have been trying to legalize sports betting or online casinos for longer than that. I covered the possibility of legalizing online poker in California for years, and it never happened in the end.

Kalshi’s “long” journey isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things.

5. Not just yes or no questions?

“The way I think about prediction markets, it's not about like the structure, it's not about a yes or no question, it's about the underlying. So it's an underlying, it's a non-usual non-traditional financial asset, so it’s not real estate or stock or or credit, it's anything. And so over time we can see structures that are just like ‘hey, get exposure to COVID’ right or short COVID or get exposure to weather or short the weather and that's just like an asset that sort of tracks anything that you'd like to get exposure to or you have a view on and a prediction market is a very simple way to kind of get that view. And so yes, over time we're basically going to expand the structures in a variety of different ways and and we're pretty excited about that and we'll probably have some sort of new structures coming in in Q4 — Q3 of Q4 this year — and we're going to go much more aggressively next year.”

• Kalshi going beyond binary “yes or no” constructions definitely opens up a lot of possibilities, and it will be interesting to see where that goes. If you’re reading tea leaves, you could think about how this could be applied to sports events.

• Side note: “Get exposure to COVID” is kind of an unfortunate turn of phrase.

The Bitcoin Conference

Mansour also spoke at The Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, which you can watch at the 5:03 mark below. I didn't find as much of interest here, and some of it was repetitive from his Solana appearance. The interviewer did ask about the idea of Kalshi offering parlays, and Mansour didn’t address the topic.