Kalshi Founders Tarek Mansour & Luana Lopes Lara On Turning Events Into Assets

Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara joined Molly O’Shea, host of the Sourcery podcast, for a conversation on how prediction markets are emerging as a new asset class. The discussion covered Kalshi’s rapid growth, its regulatory journey and how event contracts are reshaping finance by turning real-world outcomes like elections, inflation or sports results into tradable assets.

Key Takeaways

• Building a New Asset Class: Kalshi has grown from an idea to a regulated exchange with billions in trading volume offering thousands of event-based markets across topics from politics to sports.
• Regulatory Breakthroughs: After years of navigating legal barriers, Kalshi became the first U.S. exchange approved to offer election markets, marking a pivotal step toward mainstream acceptance of prediction markets.
• Market Expansion and Scale: The platform now supports 24/7 trading, integrates with major brokerages and lists new contracts in under a day showing how operational agility fuels their rapid growth.
• Truth Through Markets: Prediction markets provide a crowd-sourced, financially motivated way to aggregate information and surface probabilities, offering an alternative to traditional media or polling for understanding real-world events.
• Cultural and User Growth: Kalshi’s users range from professional traders to individuals monetizing niche expertise on everything from inflation forecasts to pop culture. Its creative marketing, viral campaigns and real-time market listings are embedding prediction markets into mainstream culture.

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