The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 33 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Mansour: Gambling houses profit from losses, exchanges profit from transparency
“Gambling is this idea where the business model is, you are the house, and your revenue is your customer's losses. Like, so, and a lot of the dynamic that you describe has to be true, because your incentive is like, well, somebody's making money, I gotta stop t…”
Lopes Lara: Over 95% of Kalshi maker orders come from peer-to-peer traders
“Over 95 are just like. Peer-to-peer, like, or funds that have like two people that just got stuck.”
Mansour: Prediction markets are required to accurately price complex traditional assets
“And if those dimensions, you don't have a good understanding of x one to x n you cannot get a good estimate of y, right? And so you, the paper basically says that you need infinite markets. And prediction markets are this notion of infinite markets, which is l…”
Mansour: Kalshi's top inflation forecaster was an amateur from Kansas
“The best inflation forecaster on CalSphere over the last few years is not, none of the institutions or the, you know, the big name hedge funds, it's this guy who lives in Kansas, never traded financial markets before, just likes to read the news, and just know…”
Lopes Lara: 2024 election showed prediction markets outperform traditional polling
“The polls were completely wrong and the markets were so much better at bringing that sort of information, and I think that it's the shining example of why these markets are forced for good, and we need to have them in the US and regulated”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi will never list war, terrorism, or assassination markets
“There are a lot of things that we wouldn't do, like wildfires we don't do, war, terrorism, assassination. Those things are bad, and like, there's a moral side of these markets, and we're not going to ever go there.”
Mansour: Banning prediction markets heightens risks by driving trading offshore
“Because if you ban it,
You're actually heightening the risks that you're trying to prevent, because now that activity is going offshore, right?
Like, and where you cannot monitor it or police it or do anything to protect it.”
Lopes Lara: 80% of Kalshi users only consume information without trading
“Most of our users, like, 80% of our users are actually just looking, like, consuming information. They're just coming in and seeing who's gonna win the Texas primary yesterday, and seeing, like, okay, the, this, the polls are saying they're tied, but they're n…”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi is developing derivatives for luxury watches and collectibles
“One thing that we're very excited for, we're actually starting to go in the direction of, for example, things like watches and bags and all of those things are like more going to the collectible side. They're actually able to do derivatives on those things.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi plans to add futures, swaps, and options
“Right now we only have the binary yes, no. We want to have things like futures, like swaps, options, all of that.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi fined two insider traders 5x their total profits
“And we put out two cases of two weeks ago of two insiders that then because we're also regulated, we're able to charge them a lot of fines. We charge them over five times what they made and all those things they banned and all that.”
Lopes Lara: CFTC blocked Kalshi election markets for two years
“Not, well, the biggest they said no to was the elections. That's why we had to end up suing them. They said no for two years.”
Mansour: Kalshi logged $10.4B in trading volume in February
“So, so volume in February was 10.4 billion.”
Mansour: Suing your primary regulator rarely works and usually kills startups
“So, so rarely does it work, and even if you win, you will probably lose. Like, you will end up getting killed in the process.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi does not offer bonuses to incentivize losing bettors
“What they do is you start losing, and then they're gonna give you a thousand dollars for you to come back, or like a deposit boost, and all those things, so that they can hook you to keep you coming back, because they want to incentivize the losers. We don't d…”
Lopes Lara: Upfront collateral requirements impair prediction market making
“The third one is really margining systems. Right now it's very bad. You have to put all the money up front. Right. Which makes a lot of, for example, will a hurricane happen this year? Very, very bad for you to be actually like market making or selling those c…”
Mansour: Kalshi is talking to AI labs to build future-prediction benchmarks
“We launched Calci Research recently, which And one of the threads that we want to work on is we're talking to some of the research labs to create a new benchmark around which models actually predict the future better.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi bars members of Congress from trading on legislation
“We actually take it even a step further. For example, if you are a government official, you cannot, like if you're in Congress, you cannot trade on bills passing, even though, I don't know if they have an agreement.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi bars speakers and staff from trading mention markets
“Obviously the person that is working on the speech or that is saying the speech cannot trade, and that's kind of how we enforce it. Like if you are Gavin Newsom and you are, there's a market where you're going to say you cannot trade it and your staff cannot t…”
Mansour: Kalshi Direct has dramatically outpaced broker channel growth
“The direct, what we call direct Cauchy Direct, which is our Cauchy.com, Cauchy app, the consumer business, that has grown, you know that has sort of dramatically outpaced the rest, Or other the sort of intermediated or broker business.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi user made over $150k trading Billboard music rankings
“To me, very important, and he's made over a 150,000 dollars, he's getting every single thing, he paid back student loans, he put himself for a master's degree, bought a car, and all those things, and he just like, Loves these markets, and he's never really tra…”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi rebates fees instead of paying market makers directly
“So the market making incentives on this side is actually, we don't pay them for it, we just rebate fees, but they have very, Very hard conditions to meet. They need to have uptime of certain amounts, spreads, and top of box size, and all of those things becaus…”
Mansour: Balancing tail-risk paranoia with founder optimism drives great outcomes
“If you're a trader, you're like an expected value calculator. Like, I think about these sort of tail really bad outcomes all the time, and Luana oftentimes doesn't, and I think this is the thing that actually leads to great outcomes.”
Mansour: Most Kalshi traders use AI summary modules in trading stacks
“And like most of our traders and their stack have some sort of like summary and synthesis module that's AI, AI driven.”
Mansour: Kalshi employees are legally barred from trading on their exchange
“Which is, as a regulated exchange, we can't trade.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi files all contracts under 24-hour CFTC review window
“We, every single contract we file with the CFTC, and they have 24 hours to stop it.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi launched institutional Block Trades feature
“We actually just launched a week ago this thing called Blocktrades.”
Lopes Lara: Over 2,000 people act as market makers on Kalshi
“There's over 2000 people that market making.”
Lopes Lara: Kalshi submits every trade and investigation to the CFTC
“Like every single trade on Kaoshi goes to the CFTC, they have every single thing, every single case goes to the CFTC for them to review.”