Kalshi Wants Your ID Whether You Gamble or Not (You Know, for Kids)
Are you worried your young child might be gambling online? Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour has an idea to combat that. He just needs a copy of your ID, whether you want to use Kalshi or not. “We are launching a portal for parents to basically submit their identification, even if they don’t want to be users of Kalshi, to see if someone is using it. Because then they can see if their children are using their ID and police it,” Mansour said. The Kalshi boss made the announcement while being interviewed Wednesday at the Semafor World Economy summit in Washington, D.C., where he talked about ways he was trying to improve his platform as the company gets heat from regulators. He also said that they’ve been thinking about launching “family accounts” to let family members know when they’re gambling too much, because “we want this to be a tool for good, not a tool for excessive behaviors.”
Mansour’s big pitch, as it was on Wednesday, is that prediction markets can offer some unique insights into the world. He specifically noted that there’s not just a decline in the trust of traditional media to accurately represent the world, but there’s also a distrust of social media. Mansour said that people in the audience probably didn’t trust their X feed, explaining that clickbait created perverse incentives. “If you say a smart nuanced take on Twitter, you probably get four likes. If you say something crazy on Twitter, there’s no bearing on the truth, you get 400,000 likes,” said Mansour.
“The opposite incentive structure exists in prediction market, right? If you’re the former and you say something nuanced, you will probably make money. You’re self-calibrated, you’re smart, and these are the people that we attract.”
Mansour said his product was important because “a vast majority” of his customers used Kalshi as a newsfeed. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket prefer the term “prediction market” over gambling, but most people understand what’s happening as the latter. You can bet on just about anything these days, though Kalshi has also cracked down on some of the more extreme wagers. Bets on war and death are banned on the platform. Kalshi has faced pressure from state regulators in recent months as more and more Attorneys General seem to be concerned about the stunning rise of online gambling. Nevada and Arizona are pursuing cases to reel in the practice.
Mansour claimed that state laws around gambling had failed because they were a “patchwork” and said federal regulation was necessary. “I think [there are] something like 34 or 35 states where sports betting is legal,” he said. “Out of those 34 states, one of them bans marketing to people that have a problem. That’s kind of crazy. Two of them banned marketing… explicit marketing to minors. Kind of crazy.” Mansour was asked about the insider trading that happens on Kalshi and said that it should be banned. But he said the reason to do it was because nobody wants to participate in a market that’s not fair. Keeping people trading seemed to be his most pressing concern. He also said that it was incredibly difficult to police insider trading on Kalshi.
“If you look at Tesla, the number of people that know of a product release beforehand is obviously a big chunk of the employees, and then probably their spouses and their cousins,” said Mansour. “And how do you find the cousin that’s buying a Tesla option before…” he said trailing off. The entire interview, which is available on YouTube, is a bit odd, if only because Mansour was very clearly driving the discussion and suggesting the next topic that he would talk about. The Semafor World Economy summit runs through Friday.
