Kalshi says it’s not a sportsbook.

On Rapid Response, Bob Safian talks with Luana Lopes Lara, Co-Founder and COO of Kalshi, about the legal battles mounting against the prediction market platform. She argues Kalshi operates as an exchange, not a sportsbook, and that consumers should ultimately decide what works best for them.

Transcript

Note: Transcripts may be automatically generated and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

The success you've had is has put a bullseye on your back. There are states are coming after you, you know, for being an unlicensed gambling operation. Federal appeals court just ruled that Ohio and Tennessee can regulate Cali through their gambling laws. Like, is is that kind of an existential threat? The more important part, if you take a step back, is that like we are an exchange. We don't set the price. We don't set the odds. We don't trade against the users. The users are just trading against each other and we take a transaction fee. A sportsbook is actually completely different. They make money. Their revenue is equal to customer losses. The more the customers lose, the more money they make. For us, it's not the same. The incentive is not to make people lose because we don't make money. An exchange is a fair, more accessible, more transparent way to trade. You can see all the prices. You can see the competition and the order book in real time. And that's why users like it so much. They are very fundamentally different mechanics and very fundamentally different products, and they need to be regulated in different ways. And it should be that the consumers at the end of the day pick what's better for them.