For years, the conventional wisdom around prediction markets was simple: sports would always be the engine. The thrill of a game, the loyalty of a fan base, the ritual of a Sunday afternoon. No other category seemed positioned to rival it. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour is no longer sure that is true.
Speaking at a recent industry event alongside co-founder Luana Lopes Lara, Mansour laid out a picture of a market in transition. Sports betting, he acknowledged, is as large as it has ever been, larger, in fact, than even peak NFL viewership years would have suggested was possible. But the number that matters to him is not the absolute size. It is the share.
“Sports is bigger than it’s ever been right now,” he said. “But it’s also a lower percentage than it’s ever been right now. And that’s a very key metric.”
What is eating into that share? According to Mansour, the answer is a collection of categories that, until recently, most platforms treated as secondary.
“We’re seeing it in politics and financials and crypto and culture,” he said. “When you look at the underlying metrics in those categories, the volume retention, the volume cohorts… those other categories are showing incredible signs of acceleration.”
The growth curve he described is notable. Mansour compared the pace of expansion to artificial intelligence, a sector that has become the defining benchmark for rapid adoption across Silicon Valley.
“You’re talking about a category seeing astronomical growth, like the type of growth that honestly we haven’t seen in any product outside of AI, or even most of AI,” he said. “I mean, there’s maybe a few AI companies, but then you have the other categories actually growing faster than sports.”
His projection for where the industry lands in the near term was direct. “For me, it’s inevitable that fast forward a few years, like one or two years, sports is a much smaller percentage of it.”
Mansour and Lopes Lara have never framed their platform primarily as a place to wager on weekend games. From early on, the company positioned prediction markets as something closer to financial instruments, tools for pricing uncertainty across any domain where outcomes can be defined and tracked.
Mansour credited the industry’s current momentum not to any single product decision but to the grinding work of building enough scale to sustain itself. “Prediction markets are very hard to build,” he said. “To get to this level of critical mass, it requires what I would call like some sort of brute force. A catalyst, a strong catalyst.”
The 2024 elections served as that catalyst, drawing millions of new users into markets and establishing liquidity levels that made the platforms attractive to institutional capital for the first time.
When Kalshi appeared on the Axios Show, co-founder Lopes Lara was clear about what she considers the genuine turning point for the industry. “The biggest change that happened in prediction markets is the fact that we won our lawsuit against the last administration in October 2024, before the election,” she said. “That is the thing that we define as what is possible in prediction markets.” That legal victory against the previous administration cleared a path that lobbying and political access alone could not have opened.
Still, questions about political access have followed the company. Axios host Dan Primack pressed Mansour on the Trump family’s financial ties to the industry, noting that Donald Trump Jr. had joined Kalshi as a paid advisor shortly after Inauguration Day while also taking an investor role at rival platform Polymarket. Primack asked directly whether it was fair to say the Trump family had a financial interest in prediction markets succeeding.
Mansour’s response was to point to balance. He noted that Kalshi had also brought on Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter as an advisor, describing the advisory board as politically diverse. When Primack noted that Cutter did not carry the same proximity to executive power, Mansour held his ground.
“We have never asked for any favors of that kind, and he has never done anything or made any regulatory ask, nothing like that,” he said.
Prediction markets now occupy a territory that did not exist in recognizable form five years ago. They run Super Bowl advertisements. They have struck data partnerships with established news organizations. The CEO of Polymarket has argued publicly that prediction markets represent the future of how news is delivered.
That has not been without controversy. Critics have pointed to markets that allow users to take positions on geopolitical violence, missile launches, and regime change, arguing that the distance between forecasting and profiting from catastrophe is thinner than the platforms acknowledge.
Polymarket removed a market speculating on nuclear weapons use following public criticism. One platform faced scrutiny after returning 54 million dollars to bettors in a market tied to a foreign leader’s fate, with the CEO explaining that the platform does not allow direct profiting from a person’s passing, though adjacent markets pricing out the regional consequences of the same event remained open.
