Q&A with Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara on suing the US government, solving market making, agentic and insider trading, ethics, and more
Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara are the co-founders of Kalshi, the first federally regulated prediction market in the US.
Context & Ripple Effects
Kalshi began as a yes/no-event trading startup and later emerged alongside Polymarket as a major prediction-market platform; its reported rise in trading volume made questions of liquidity and market conduct more consequential.
This interview puts its federal-regulation positioning under scrutiny as Kalshi presses into contested categories, including sports prediction markets, while its leadership discusses litigation, market making, automated agents, and insider trading.
First-order effects
- The co-founders publicly identify market making and agentic trading as operational priorities, while putting insider-trading controls and ethical boundaries at the center of Kalshi’s credibility with users and regulators.
- Kalshi’s willingness to discuss suing the government underscores that regulatory access is an active business constraint, not simply a compliance backdrop.
Second-order effects
- Market makers and sophisticated users have a clearer signal that Kalshi is trying to deepen liquidity and accommodate more automated participation; that raises the importance of surveillance and rules that distinguish informed trading from prohibited conduct.
- Rival prediction platforms and sports-betting incumbents face added pressure to defend their own regulatory models as Kalshi contests where event contracts can be offered.
Third-order effects
- If regulated prediction markets keep expanding, their competitive advantage will depend less on novelty than on a trust stack: reliable liquidity, enforceable market-integrity rules, and a workable regulatory perimeter.
- Agent-driven trading could make those governance questions more acute, pushing platforms and regulators toward clearer accountability for automated order flow and access to nonpublic information.
The trend: Prediction markets are evolving from niche event-betting products into regulated financial-market infrastructure, with liquidity, automation, and integrity controls becoming the central battlegrounds.