When Victoria University of Wellington’s great little prediction market, iPredict, announced in 2015 it would be shutting down, it had a couple of hundred thousand dollars of traders’ deposited funds in the bank. It was a very small, very limited, academic enterprise.
Kalshi is a US-based prediction market. It is regulated by America’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, which fully authorised it in 2023. It is identical in principle to what iPredict was. But Kalshi’s Series F funding round raised US$1 billion (NZ$1.7b) at a $22b valuation earlier this year. Its annualised trading volume recently hit $178b, generating annualised revenue of around $1.5b.
To read the article on the NZ Herald website, click here.