# Kalshi

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/kalshi
> Updated: 2026-10-15
> Categories: AI Compute, Finance AI
> License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) - attribute to "AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai)"
> Cite as: AI Wiki. "Kalshi." aiwiki.ai, 15 Oct 2026. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/kalshi
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), the free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Reuse freely with attribution.

Kalshi is a US exchange for event contracts: binary "yes" or "no" contracts that pay $1 if a stated event happens and nothing if it does not, so that a contract's price can be read as the market's estimate of the event's probability.[1][2] Its exchange, operated by KalshiEX LLC, was designated as a contract market by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in November 2020, and the company calls itself the "first fully regulated financial exchange in the U.S. specifically for event contracts."[3][4] Founded in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara and opened to the public in July 2021, the New York-based company won a federal court case in 2024 that let it list election contracts, moved heavily into sports in 2025, and was valued at $22 billion in May 2026.[5][6][7][8][9] For the AI industry, Kalshi lists markets on model leaderboards, model releases and AI company events, and since March 2026 it has listed contracts on the hourly rental price of [NVIDIA](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/nvidia) [GPUs](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/gpu) that settle on data from [Ornn](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/ornn), from which it derives what it calls compute forward curves.[10][11][12] AI products including [Perplexity](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/perplexity), [Grok](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/grok), Google Finance and [ChatGPT](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/chatgpt) have displayed its prices, and researchers use its markets to test how well [large language models](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/large_language_model) forecast real events.[13][1][14][15][16]

| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Exchange | KalshiEX LLC, a designated contract market regulated by the CFTC[3] |
| Founded | 2018, by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara[5] |
| Headquarters | New York[6] |
| Public launch | July 2021, in beta[5] |
| Leadership (2026) | Tarek Mansour (CEO), Luana Lopes Lara (COO), Udesh Jha (chief risk officer)[17][18] |
| Staff and users | About 150 employees and about 2 million individual investors, per Bloomberg in June 2026[17] |
| Valuation | $22 billion after a $1 billion Series F (May 2026); talks at $40 billion reported in September 2026[9][19] |
| Compute contracts | Hourly rental prices of the NVIDIA B200, H200, H100, A100 and RTX 5090, settled on Ornn data, since March 2026[10][11] |

## History

### Founding and CFTC approval

Mansour and Lopes Lara were classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[17] Both had interned at Wall Street firms including Bridgewater Associates, Citadel and Goldman Sachs, and Fortune traced the idea for Kalshi partly to 2016, when Mansour, interning on a Goldman Sachs equity derivatives desk, saw clients looking for ways to hedge the Brexit vote.[5] Lopes Lara has described another starting point: in early 2018, while interning at Five Rings, she proposed a bet on whether Kylie Jenner was pregnant, and she and Mansour founded the company later that year.[17] Kalshi went through Y Combinator's winter 2019 batch.[20]

The CFTC announced on November 4, 2020 that it had issued an order designating KalshiEX LLC, then a San Francisco company organized under Delaware law, as a contract market under Section 5 of the Commodity Exchange Act.[3] In February 2021 Kalshi raised a $30 million Series A from investors including Sequoia Capital, Charles Schwab and Henry Kravis, and in July 2021 it opened in beta.[5] Early markets asked whether 2021 would be the hottest year on record, whether Lil Nas X's album Montero would reach a sales threshold, and how many travelers the TSA would screen per day. Positions were capped at $25,000 per market, and Mansour told Fortune that the long-term goal was "to be the New York Stock Exchange for event contracts."[5]

### Election contracts

On June 12, 2023, Kalshi self-certified contracts on which party would control each chamber of Congress. The CFTC disapproved them on September 22, 2023 under section 5c(c)(5)(C) of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC Regulation 40.11, finding that they involved gaming and activity unlawful under state law and were contrary to the public interest.[21] Kalshi sued the agency in federal court in Washington. In an order on September 6, 2024, Judge Jia Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia overturned the CFTC's decision, and Mansour said that election markets were "legal in the United States for the first time in 100 years."[7]

A federal appeals court let the contracts trade in early October 2024, and Kalshi opened markets on the presidential race. By October 29, 2024, NPR reported, more than $100 million had been wagered on the race on Kalshi, whose market then gave Donald Trump a 63% chance of winning while most polls showed a statistical tie; Senator Jeff Merkley called the court decision "a huge mistake."[22] In May 2025 the CFTC filed an unopposed motion to drop its appeal, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed the case on May 7, 2025, leaving the district court's ruling in place. "Election markets are here to stay," Mansour said.[23]

### Sports and growth

In January 2025, a month after a competitor began offering similar contracts, Kalshi self-certified sports event contracts and started listing them.[2][8] Its sports markets came to cover game winners, the NFL draft and the Super Bowl halftime show, as well as in-game props and multi-leg "combos," and Kalshi advertised itself as "the first app for legal sports betting in all 50 states." The Ninth Circuit later found that more than 90% of Kalshi's trades in 2025, representing 95% of its revenue, were sports related.[8]

Brokerage partners widened its reach. On March 17, 2025 Robinhood opened a prediction-markets hub offering Kalshi's contracts on the NCAA basketball tournaments and the federal funds rate in every state except Nevada, with a fee of two cents per contract split between the two firms.[24] Coinbase announced prediction markets powered by Kalshi in December 2025 and by late January 2026 offered them in all 50 states, with Kalshi supplying all market flow at launch.[25] Kalshi said in December 2025 that its weekly trading volume exceeded $1 billion, up more than 1,000% from 2024.[20] Monthly volume reached a record $17.9 billion in May 2026, roughly 80% of it from sports, according to Dune Analytics data cited by Bloomberg; Cointelegraph, also citing Dune, put June 2026 notional volume above $33 billion.[17][15]

The growth drew state opposition. Nevada and New Jersey sent cease-and-desist letters in March 2025, and by mid-2026 Bloomberg counted court challenges to Kalshi in at least 19 states (see [Regulation and litigation](#regulation-and-litigation)).[8][2][17] Kalshi kept adding products: GPU compute contracts in March 2026 and, after CFTC approval on May 29, 2026, a bitcoin perpetual futures contract, which Fortune reported made it the first US-based firm approved to offer that product.[11][26]

## Products and markets

### How the contracts work

Traders buy "yes" or "no" positions that pay $1 if correct and nothing if wrong, and the price of a contract rises or falls with traders' views of how likely the event is.[1][2] Each market's rules name the source used for settlement, such as a government statistic, a public leaderboard or a commercial price index, and say how revisions and missing data are handled.[10] Many events are listed as ladders of strikes ("above $5.50", "above $6.00" and so on), so that the prices across the ladder describe a probability distribution rather than a single estimate.[10] Kalshi publishes series, events, rules, prices and settlement values through a public API, which outside projects use; the Prophet Arena benchmark, for example, pulls live market snapshots from it.[10][16]

### Market categories

| Category | Examples | Notes | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sports | Game winners, NFL draft, Super Bowl halftime show, props and combos | More than 90% of trades in 2025 | [8] |
| Elections and politics | 2024 presidential race; control of Congress | Listed after the 2024 court ruling | [21][22] |
| Economics | Federal funds rate decisions | Distributed through Robinhood from March 2025 | [24] |
| Culture and "mentions" | MrBeast videos, subscriber counts and wedding date; words said at public events | Subject of Kalshi's first public insider-trading cases | [27] |
| Weather and climate | Hottest year on record, Seattle rainfall, snowfall in New York City | Among the earliest listings | [5][27] |
| Technology and AI | Model leaderboards, release dates, benchmark scores, AI company IPOs | Listed since at least 2023 | [10] |
| Compute | Hourly GPU rental prices, DRAM spot prices, API token prices | Since March 2026; mostly settled on Ornn data | [10][11] |
| Crypto derivatives | Bitcoin perpetual futures | Approved by the CFTC on May 29, 2026 | [26] |

## Compute and AI markets

### GPU rental-price contracts

Kalshi's market records show its first compute markets opening on March 2, 2026. They asked whether the hourly rental price of each of five NVIDIA chips, the [B200](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/nvidia_b200), [H200](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/nvidia_h200), [H100](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/nvidia_h100) SXM, [A100](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/nvidia_a100) SXM4 and [GeForce RTX 5090](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/nvidia_geforce_rtx_5090), would be above a set level on March 31, 2026, as reported by Ornn.[10] Data Center Dynamics reported the listing on March 4, 2026, describing Ornn's index as built from live traded spot prices and putting the H100 at $1.70 per hour at the time.[11] Ornn co-founder Kush Bavaria said that "you can now trade AI compute prices on a CFTC-regulated exchange," adding: "We believe compute is becoming a commodity class on par with energy and metals."[11] Kalshi tags these series "Compute" and "AI", and their terms bar employees of the source agency, and anyone holding material non-public information about the underlying price, from trading them.[10]

Kalshi added further contract structures through the spring and summer. All of them settle on Ornn's published values in US dollars per GPU-hour, ignore revisions made after expiration, and round to two decimal places.[10]

| Contract type | Example question (Kalshi wording) | First listed | Settlement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Month-end price | "Will the H200 compute per hour price be above $2.52 on Mar 31?" | March 2, 2026 | Index value on the last day of the month |
| Weekly direction | "B200 price up in next week?" | March 26, 2026 | Next weekly value against a stated "price to beat" |
| Quarter and year highs | "Will the B200 compute per hour price be above $7.07 by Jun 30?" | May 27, 2026 | Whether the index exceeds the level by June 30 or December 31, 2026 |
| Weekly price ladder | "Will the NVIDIA B200 compute per hour price be above $7 at 4 PM ET on Jul 24?" | June 12, 2026 (B200, H200, RTX 5090); June 29, 2026 (H100, A100) | Index value at 4 p.m. Eastern on a Friday |
| Monthly average | "Will the monthly average compute price of NVIDIA's B200 be above $7.00 in June 2027?" | June 17, 2026 (B200, H200, RTX 5090); July 1, 2026 (H100, A100) | Arithmetic mean of Ornn's hourly values over the calendar month |

As of October 15, 2026, the weekly price ladders had settled every Friday from June 19 (July 3 for the H100 and A100) through October 9, 2026, with no later weekly event listed, while monthly-average contracts were open for every month through August 2027.[10] The index values Kalshi recorded at settlement show how far rental rates moved during the year:[10]

| Chip (Ornn series) | March 31, 2026 | July 31, 2026 | October 9, 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| B200 | $4.70 | $6.41 | $7.46 |
| H200 | $2.55 | $5.62 | $5.70 |
| H100 SXM | $1.76 | $2.76 | $2.79 |
| A100 SXM4 | $0.96 | $1.03 | $0.92 |
| RTX 5090 | $0.48 | $0.49 | $0.61 |

Values are US dollars per GPU-hour used to settle Kalshi's month-end contracts (March 31 and July 31) and weekly contracts (October 9). They are settlement prints of an index, not quotes from any one cloud provider.[10][11]

### Compute forward curves

On July 14, 2026, Kalshi announced compute forward curves for the B200, H200 and A100, showing the implied future price of renting one hour of each chip.[12] The tool combines weekly and monthly event contracts reaching up to a year ahead, and an algorithm stitches them into a single curve meant as a reference for futures, options and other derivatives.[18] The curves themselves are not tradable. Kalshi presented them as reference prices for structuring swaps and over-the-counter compute deals, said direct exposure was available through the underlying contracts and block trades, and named AI labs, cloud providers and [data center](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/data_center) operators as target users.[12] "Compute is the new oil. Like every commodity before it, it needs a real derivatives market," Mansour said.[12] Udesh Jha, Kalshi's chief risk officer, told Bloomberg: "We are using prediction markets to build the forward curve, which will provide the market a view of what compute costs" will be in the future.[18]

Kalshi's route differed from that of the futures exchanges. CME Group, working with [Silicon Data](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/silicon_data), and Intercontinental Exchange, working with Ornn, announced cash-settled compute futures in May 2026 that still needed regulatory approval, while Kalshi built its curve from contracts that were already trading; The Next Web compared the contest to the way oil trading settled on the Brent and WTI benchmarks.[18] (The exchange products are covered in [CME Compute Futures](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/gpu_compute_futures) and [compute derivatives](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/compute_derivatives).) On August 19, 2026, the CFTC asked for public comment on the listing of compute derivatives, covering cash-market liquidity, manipulation, customer protection and perpetual compute futures. Chairman Michael Selig said that "America cannot win the AI race without a robust derivatives market for compute."[28]

### Trading activity and accuracy

The compute markets have stayed small next to Kalshi's sports business. A report by the data firm Allium, based on data queried in late July 2026, found that Kalshi's GPU markets had traded $4.4 million, about 15 times the $285,000 traded on Polymarket's GPU markets, which also settle on Ornn.[29] Allium measured annualized volatility in the underlying rental rates from 43% for the A100 to 137% for the H200, put the B200 at about $6.58 an hour on Ornn, and found that Kalshi's prices implied year-end rates within 6% of then-current levels for all five chips.[29] It also found that two days before close, Kalshi's B200 estimate was still a median 10% away from the settling rate, and it examined what would have to change before the markets could support a large hedge.[29]

### Memory, token and hardware contracts

Kalshi extended the approach to other AI inputs in mid-2026. A contract on the year-end 2027 spot price of 16-gigabit DDR5 [DRAM](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/dram), settled on TrendForce data, opened on June 30, 2026, and weekly and monthly DDR5 contracts settled on Ornn followed from July 24.[10] On August 6, 2026 Kalshi listed short-dated contracts on Ornn's average price per million tokens for models from [OpenAI](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/openai), [Anthropic](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/anthropic), Google and DeepSeek, which track [API prices](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/llm_api_pricing_comparison) rather than hardware rents.[10] A market opened on July 22, 2026 asks whether NVIDIA will release [Vera Rubin](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/nvidia_vera_rubin) to the public before January 1, 2027.[10]

### AI model and company markets

Kalshi has listed markets on AI developments since at least April 2023, when it asked whether OpenAI would release GPT-5 by the end of that year.[10] Its AI markets fall into a few groups: leaderboard rankings, release dates, benchmark thresholds, corporate events such as IPOs and leadership changes, and usage statistics. Settlement sources named in the rules include the [LMArena](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/lmarena_org) text leaderboard, LiveBench, [Humanity's Last Exam](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/humanity_s_last_exam), [OpenRouter](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/openrouter)'s market-share rankings and the Ramp AI Index of business adoption.[10] The leaderboard contracts spell out tie-breakers (rank, then Arena score, then vote count, then release date) and require the leaderboard to be read with style control removed.[10] The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2025 that trading in AI markets on Kalshi and Polymarket had reached nearly $20 million that month and that Kalshi's AI volume was ten times its level at the start of the year.[30]

| Market (Kalshi wording) | First listed | Settlement source in rules | Outcome or status (October 15, 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Will GPT-5 be released by December 31, 2023?" | April 13, 2023 | OpenAI | No |
| "Will Sam Altman be the next permanent CEO of OpenAI?" | November 20, 2023 | OpenAI | Yes (closed November 22, 2023) |
| "Best AI at year end?" | March 14, 2024 | LMArena (formerly LMSYS) text leaderboard | 2025 edition resolved to Google's Gemini; 2026 edition open |
| "What will be the top AI model this month?" | December 12, 2024 | LMArena text leaderboard | Monthly series |
| "Which AI company will have the best coding model on [date]?" | March 22, 2025 | LiveBench "Coding Average" | Recurring series |
| "When will OpenAI IPO?" | July 30, 2025 | News organizations | "Before Sep 1, 2026" resolved No |
| "When will Anthropic officially announce an IPO?" | April 1, 2026 | S-1 effectiveness, pricing or ticker assignment | Open |
| "Will any LLM score at least [X]% on Humanity's Last Exam before Dec 31, 2026?" | May 20, 2026 | Humanity's Last Exam | Open |
| "Anthropic market share this week?" | August 10, 2026 | OpenRouter market share by model author | Weekly series |

Source for the table: Kalshi market records.[10]

### Use by AI products and researchers

AI companies have used Kalshi's prices as a live data feed. Perplexity began showing Kalshi odds in its AI search engine in March 2025, starting with the NCAA basketball tournaments.[13] On July 24, 2025, xAI and Kalshi announced that Grok would be built into Kalshi's platform, so users could ask it for data, historical odds and headlines before placing trades.[1] Google said on November 6, 2025 that Google Finance would add prediction-market data from Kalshi and Polymarket, starting with Labs users, so people could "ask questions about future market events and harness the wisdom of the crowds."[14] Meta partnered with Kalshi in March 2026 to show Kalshi markets on Threads. NPR later reported that Mark Zuckerberg had met Mansour in 2025 about buying Kalshi, talks that never advanced, and that Meta was building a play-money prediction app, Arena, in which Meta's AI systems write the questions and decide the outcomes.[31] In July 2026, ChatGPT search began showing Kalshi's World Cup match odds labeled "Source: Kalshi," without letting users bet; Cointelegraph described it as OpenAI's first reported deal with a prediction market platform.[15]

Researchers use Kalshi questions to test models on events whose outcomes were unknown when the models were trained. Prophet Arena, a live forecasting benchmark described in a paper first posted in October 2025, sources unresolved events from Kalshi and gives models live Kalshi market snapshots together with retrieved news. Its reported results covered 1,367 Kalshi events resolved before October 11, 2025, 76% of them sports, and found that many models forecast well but take in new information more slowly than markets as resolution approaches.[16] KalshiBench, posted in December 2025, drew 300 Kalshi questions that resolved after the tested models' training cutoffs; all five frontier models were overconfident, Claude Opus 4.5 had the lowest expected calibration error (0.120), and only one model beat a base-rate forecast on Brier skill score.[32] In Prediction Arena, [AI agents](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/ai_agents) that each started with $10,000 of real capital traded autonomously on Kalshi and Polymarket from January 12 to March 9, 2026. The six frontier models lost between 16.0% and 30.8% on Kalshi, an average of 22.6%, against an average loss of 1.1% on Polymarket, a gap the authors attributed largely to platform design.[33]

## Regulation and litigation

Kalshi lists most contracts by self-certifying them to the CFTC, which can review and block contracts involving activities such as gaming, terrorism, assassination or war. On September 30, 2025 the agency sent exchanges a letter cautioning them to plan for state enforcement actions and litigation over sports contracts.[8] Since 2025 Kalshi's main legal fights have been with states that treat its sports contracts as unlicensed sports betting. The central question is whether those contracts are "swaps" within the CFTC's exclusive jurisdiction, which would preempt state gambling laws.[2][8]

| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| November 4, 2020 | CFTC announces Kalshi's designation as a contract market | [3] |
| September 22, 2023 | CFTC disapproves Kalshi's congressional control contracts | [21] |
| September 6, 2024 | Judge Jia Cobb overturns the CFTC order | [7] |
| March 2025 | Nevada and New Jersey regulators send cease-and-desist letters; Kalshi sues both | [8][2] |
| April 2025 | Federal judges in Nevada and New Jersey (April 28) grant Kalshi preliminary injunctions | [8] |
| May 7, 2025 | D.C. Circuit dismisses the CFTC's election-contract appeal | [23] |
| August 1, 2025 | Federal court in Maryland denies Kalshi a preliminary injunction | [8] |
| Late 2025 | Nevada federal court dissolves its injunction | [8] |
| January 20, 2026 | Massachusetts judge says he will bar Kalshi's sports contracts in the state | [4] |
| March 2026 | Arizona's attorney general files 20 misdemeanor charges against Kalshi | [6] |
| April 6, 2026 | Third Circuit affirms Kalshi's injunction against New Jersey, 2-1 | [2] |
| May 5, 2026 | Federal judge in Arizona grants the CFTC an injunction ending the state prosecution | [6] |
| July 31, 2026 | New York's attorney general sues Kalshi, seeking damages that could total at least $36 billion | [34] |
| August 28, 2026 | Ninth Circuit affirms the dissolution of Kalshi's Nevada injunction | [8] |
| September 2, 2026 | New Jersey petitions the Supreme Court (No. 26-299) | [35] |
| September 25, 2026 | Sixth Circuit rules for Ohio and Tennessee | [36] |

As of mid-October 2026 the federal appeals courts were split. In the New Jersey case, Judge David Porter, joined by Chief Judge Michael Chagares, held that Kalshi was likely to show its sports contracts are swaps and that the Commodity Exchange Act preempts New Jersey's gambling laws as applied to them; Judge Jane Roth dissented.[2] The Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Ryan Nelson, held that the contracts were likely not swaps because they were sports bets, rejected Kalshi's conflict and field preemption arguments, including its claim that it could not comply with both federal and Nevada law (the court noted that regulated entities in Nevada use geofencing), and sent questions about Kalshi's election contracts back to the district court.[8] A unanimous Sixth Circuit panel led by Judge Julia Smith Gibbons wrote that "Kalshi's sports event contracts have only downstream economic consequences" and held that, even if they were swaps, federal law would not preempt the state laws.[36] New Jersey's petition asks the Supreme Court to resolve the question. Kalshi's response was due November 9, 2026, and amicus briefs had been filed by groups including the National Football League, the American Gaming Association, 145 Indian tribes and former CFTC chairman Gary Gensler.[35]

The CFTC under Chairman Selig has taken Kalshi's side against the states. After Arizona's attorney general, Kris Mayes, charged Kalshi in March 2026 with operating an unlicensed wagering business and allowing bets on Arizona elections, the CFTC obtained a temporary restraining order in mid-April and then a preliminary injunction from Judge Michael Liburdi, who held that Arizona's gambling laws were preempted.[6] New York's attorney general, Letitia James, sued on July 31, 2026, seeking an order blocking Kalshi's event contracts in the state along with restitution, disgorgement and penalties; the same week the CFTC moved for a temporary restraining order to stop New York from pursuing criminal or civil enforcement against Kalshi and other CFTC-registered platforms.[34] In Massachusetts, where the attorney general sued in September 2025, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Christopher Barry-Smith said in January 2026 that he would issue a preliminary injunction against Kalshi's sports contracts, writing that the company knew it was operating in states that require sports wagering licenses and "chose to take that risk head-on."[4]

## Business

### Funding and valuation

| Announced | Round | Amount | Valuation | Lead investor(s) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| February 2021 | Series A | $30 million | Not disclosed | Investors included Sequoia Capital, Charles Schwab and Henry Kravis | [5] |
| June 25, 2025 | Series C | $185 million | $2 billion | Paradigm | [37] |
| October 10, 2025 | Not named | More than $300 million | $5 billion | Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz | [38] |
| December 2, 2025 | Series E | $1 billion | $11 billion | Paradigm | [20] |
| May 7, 2026 | Series F | $1 billion | $22 billion | Coatue | [9] |
| September 30, 2026 (reported talks) | Not named | About $1 billion | $40 billion | Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management, in talks | [19] |

Investors in the December 2025 round also included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Meritech Capital, IVP, ARK Invest, Anthos Capital, CapitalG and Y Combinator.[20] When it announced the Series F, Kalshi told Bloomberg that its annualized revenue exceeded $1.5 billion and said it hosted 90% of US prediction-market activity; Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm also took part in that round.[9] Reuters reported on September 30, 2026 that Kalshi was in advanced talks to raise about $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation, with Tiger Global and Dragoneer also possible participants; the Financial Times had first reported talks at that valuation on June 24.[19]

### Distribution and data partners

| Date | Partner | Arrangement | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 17, 2025 | Robinhood | Prediction-markets hub routing customers to Kalshi contracts | [24] |
| March 18, 2025 | Perplexity | Kalshi odds shown in AI search results | [13] |
| July 24, 2025 | xAI | Grok integrated into Kalshi's trading platform | [1] |
| November 6, 2025 | Google | Kalshi and Polymarket data added to Google Finance | [14] |
| December 4, 2025 | CNBC | Multi-year exclusive deal to use Kalshi data on air and online from 2026 | [39] |
| December 2025 | Coinbase | Kalshi-powered prediction markets, nationwide by January 2026 | [25] |
| March 2026 | Meta | Kalshi markets shown on Threads | [31] |
| July 2026 | OpenAI | Kalshi World Cup odds shown in ChatGPT search | [15] |

Under the CNBC agreement, the network said it would use Kalshi data on programs including Squawk Box and Fast Money and run a Kalshi ticker alongside on-air segments, while Kalshi would add a CNBC page of selected markets to its site.[39]

### People

Mansour, the chief executive, is the company's public face, while Lopes Lara, as chief operating officer, runs much of the daily business, including engineering, market listings and liquidity partners; Bloomberg put her net worth at $2.6 billion in June 2026.[17] Donald Trump Jr. advises the company, and the rapper Jay-Z is a consultant and investor through his venture firm MarcyPen.[17] Robert DeNault leads Kalshi's enforcement team.[27] Bloomberg reported about 150 employees in June 2026, up from 35 a year earlier.[17]

## Reception and criticism

The main criticism is that Kalshi offers gambling under a different label. State officials and courts have made that argument repeatedly: the Ninth Circuit treated Kalshi's sports contracts as sports bets, and New York's Letitia James said that "no matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple."[8][34] Before the 2024 election, Senator Merkley argued that betting on elections "corrupts our American elections," while Mansour said election markets promote election integrity.[22] In May 2026 Kalshi became the first prediction market to join the National Council on Problem Gambling, a step Axios described as an acknowledgment that some users may show troubling financial behavior, even though the company still calls their activity trading.[40]

Market integrity is a second concern. On February 25, 2026, Kalshi published the results of its first insider-trading investigations: an editor for the YouTube creator MrBeast, who had traded about $4,000 on markets about the creator's videos, was fined $20,000, suspended for two years and reported to the CFTC, and Kyle Langford, a former candidate for governor of California who bet on his own campaign, received a five-year ban and a $2,200 fine.[27] Experts told NPR that exchanges' internal systems can catch only some insider activity.[27] Market design has also drawn disputes. After the death of Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei was confirmed on February 28, 2026, Kalshi did not pay out its "Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader?" market as "yes." It applied a rule that resolves the market at its last traded price if the leader leaves office solely by dying, then refunded fees and net losses, which Bloomberg put at about $2.2 million.[17][41] Traders filed a proposed class action in federal court in the Central District of California, arguing that the rule had not been clearly disclosed; Kalshi said it had followed its published rules.[41]

For the compute markets, the open questions are liquidity and predictive value. Allium's data showed modest volumes and, in the B200 markets it studied, forecasts that were still a median 10% from the final rate two days before settlement.[29] Kalshi's position is that the benchmarks help price future GPU capacity and can serve as a reference for over-the-counter compute deals and other institutional risk-management products.[12]

## See also

- [Ornn](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/ornn)
- [Compute derivatives](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/compute_derivatives)
- [CME Compute Futures](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/gpu_compute_futures)
- [AI compute](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/ai_compute)
- [Cloud AI GPU Pricing Comparison](https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/cloud_gpu_pricing_comparison)

## References

1. "Elon Musk's Grok AI integrates with Kalshi, Paradigm-backed prediction market." The Block, 2025-07-24. https://www.theblock.co/post/364217/elon-musk-grok-kalshi
2. "KalshiEX LLC v. Flaherty, No. 25-1922 (opinion of the court)." U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, 2026-04-06. https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/251922p.pdf
3. "CFTC Designates KalshiEX LLC as a Contract Market (Release No. 8302-20)." Commodity Futures Trading Commission, 2020-11-04. https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8302-20
4. "Judge to order prediction market Kalshi to stop taking de facto sports bets in Massachusetts." WBUR (State House News Service), 2026-01-21. https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/01/21/massachusetts-sports-action-kalshi
5. "From Lil Nas X to the climate, Kalshi wants to let investors bet on it all." Fortune, 2021-09-23. https://fortune.com/2021/09/23/kalshi-bet-investors-lil-nas-x-climate-change/
6. "Arizona's criminal case against Kalshi permanently blocked by federal judge." Arizona Mirror via News From The States, 2026-05-05. https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/arizonas-criminal-case-against-kalshi-permanently-blocked-federal-judge
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15. "OpenAI Adds Kalshi World Cup Odds to ChatGPT Search." Cointelegraph, 2026-07-14. https://cointelegraph.com/news/openai-kalshi-prediction-markets-world-cup-chatgpt
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18. "Kalshi builds a forward curve for computing power as exchanges race to turn GPUs into a tradable commodity." The Next Web, 2026-07-14. https://thenextweb.com/news/kalshi-compute-forward-curve-gpu-ai
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24. "Robinhood launches prediction market with March Madness, Fed rates as first offerings." Fortune, 2025-03-17. https://fortune.com/2025/03/17/robinhood-launches-prediction-market-with-march-madness-fed-rates-as-first-offerings/
25. "Coinbase prediction markets go live in all 50 US states via Kalshi." The Block, 2026-01-28. https://www.theblock.co/post/387416/coinbase-prediction-markets-go-live-in-all-50-us-states-via-kalshi
26. "Kalshi adds perpetual futures for U.S. traders following thumbs-up from key regulator." Fortune, 2026-05-29. https://fortune.com/2026/05/29/kalshi-perpetual-futures-us-traders-cftc-regulator-approval/
27. "Kalshi accuses MrBeast editor of insider trading." NPR, 2026-02-25. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/25/nx-s1-5726050/kalshi-insider-trading-enforcement-actions
28. "CFTC Requests Comment on the Listing of Compute Derivatives Contracts (Release No. 9286-26)." Commodity Futures Trading Commission, 2026-08-19. https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9286-26
29. "Polymarket and Kalshi now predict future GPU rental prices" (Olivia Denk and Elton Shehdula). Allium, 2026-07-30. https://www.allium.so/reports/gpu-rental-prediction-markets
30. "Gamblers are betting millions on the AI arms race." La Voce di New York, 2025-08-18. https://lavocedinewyork.com/en/business/2025/08/18/gamblers-are-betting-millions-on-the-ai-arms-race/
31. "Meta considered buying Kalshi before developing its own prediction market app." NPR, 2026-06-30. https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5875468/meta-kalshi-prediction-market-acquisition-talks
32. "Do Large Language Models Know What They Don't Know? KalshiBench: A New Benchmark for Evaluating Epistemic Calibration via Prediction Markets" (Lukas Nel). arXiv, 2025-12-17. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16030
33. "Prediction Arena: Benchmarking AI Models on Real-World Prediction Markets" (Zhang et al.). arXiv, 2026-03-28. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07355
34. "New York sues Kalshi over illegal gambling claims, seeks $36 billion in damages." The Block, 2026-07-31. https://www.theblock.co/post/410247/new-york-sues-kalshi
35. "Docket No. 26-299: Mary Jo Flaherty, Interim Director, New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, et al. v. KalshiEX, LLC (accessed October 15, 2026)." Supreme Court of the United States, 2026-10-15. https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/26-299.html
36. "Sixth Circuit says states can regulate Kalshi's prediction markets." Courthouse News Service, 2026-09-25. https://www.courthousenews.com/sixth-circuit-says-states-can-regulate-kalshi-other-prediction-markets/
37. "Prediction Market Kalshi Notches $2 Billion Valuation With $185 Million Raise." Decrypt, 2025-06-25. https://decrypt.co/327074/prediction-market-kalshi-2-billion-valuation-185-million-raise
38. "Kalshi hits $5B valuation days after rival Polymarket gets $2B NYSE backing at $8B." TechCrunch, 2025-10-10. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/10/kalshi-hits-5b-valuation-days-after-rival-polymarket-gets-2b-nyse-backing-at-8b/
39. "CNBC and Kalshi Strike Exclusive Partnership." CNBC, 2025-12-04. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/04/cnbc-and-kalshi-strike-exclusive-partnership.html
40. "Exclusive: Kalshi joins National Council on Problem Gambling as prediction markets surge." Axios, 2026-05-18. https://www.axios.com/2026/05/18/kalshi-national-council-problem-gambling
41. Logan Hitchcock. "Kalshi Sued Over Refusing to Pay Out Prediction Market After Iran Leader's Death." Decrypt, 2026-03-06. https://decrypt.co/360293/kalshi-sued-refusing-pay-out-prediction-market-iran-leader-death