Kalshi cofounder Tarek Mansour is a self-professed “math nerd” who inexplicably finds himself in the midst of a generational battle between traditional sports betting and the disruptive force that is prediction markets.
Speaking to Front Office Sports at Kalshi’s New York City headquarters, he’s most excited by his company’s recent launch of perpetual futures and the fact that businesses and teams have begun to use his platform to hedge against the risk of financial loss due to things like free drink promos or relegation.
But sports event contracts are perhaps the most pressing issue in prediction markets, and it’s where much of Kalshi’s trading volume has come from—although Mansour notes the percentage of total volume from sports has been declining in recent months (data from analytics firm Dune suggests he has a point; for awhile, sports represented over 90% of total trading volume on Kalshi, but in the week of June 8 it made up only 53%, and the last time it was over 60% was the week of April 27).
Front Office Sports: You first launched sports event contracts in January of last year. You had to expect sports would be a lightning rod, right?
Mansour: I don’t know. I mean, look, elections were really the first time we went mainstream. We had spent four years with no product, just trying the regulatory route, and then we had to sue the government because we disagreed on the legal interpretation. We won, and that was the first time we saw a real inflection, where we had a critical mass of customers, crypto was going well, and culture markets were starting to show early signs of being a bigger category.
