Comment Text:
Hello, As someone that has an immense amount of respect for government agencies, I think you should know some more information about what is going on here.
Kalshi hired former CFTC staff and has spent a long time (successfully) lobbying to take down their largest competitor PredictIt. PredictIt was a good company run by people that cared about fair markets and took election modeling very seriously.
Kalshi on the other hand is run by the very thing the CFTC is supposed to help protect against. VC-backed sharks that are out to cheat their way to the top by any means necessary. Almost every one of the positive comments you see here can be traced back to the CEO of Kalshi posting in his own Kalshi discord asking people to leave comments making up reasons these markets could be used legitimately. I highly encourage you to look into this yourself.
One of the well-known members of the political gambling community himself wrote these comment in the Kalshi discord.
"remember the point is to come up with theoretical uses, not the ones that you think would work"
and this
"we are not trying to actually solve any problem other than getting the commission to let us trade"
It is full of comments like this. And those are the same people expressing positive comments here to the CFTC.
Kalshi knowingly lies about their products to represent them as if they are used as "hedging" instruments when in reality they know they are not being used that way at all. In fact the overwhelming majority of the volume on the site is because Kalshi themselves is funding a liquidity bot in an attempt to buy market share after utilizing former CFTC staff to get their rival PredictIt shut down. A quick look at the site will show you there is nowhere close to enough liquidity to actually utilize any of these markets as effective hedging instruments as they claim.
They also advertise their markets regularly as pseudo "insurance" contracts. Look no further than their official twitter account to see proof of this yourself. Although they have been deleting some of this evidence lately. They specifically use the term insurance. This is obviously not what they actually are and just goes to show you what kind of people are behind Kalshi. They think as long as they have a big enough stack of money, they will get their way. All I ask is that you uphold the principles of the CFTC and consider letting reputable companies provide election markets and not the likes of Kalshi.
Thank you for your service to the people of the United States of America
