Table of Contents
GRAMMeandering about the outcome of the presidential election became legal in the United States in early October, after decades of prohibition, becoming a new type of pre-election poll. Online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket accepted billions of dollars in bets on the outcome, and their users favored Donald Trump with a 70% chance of beating Kamala Harris, which is out of sync with traditional polls. . The Trump camp trumpeted the predictions.
In the UK, electoral gambling is legal and takes a very different form. Traditional sportsbooks and betting companies accept bets from players and set prices and odds. Betting is not so much like prediction markets as it is like horse racing. These markets are prone to their own scandals. Kalshi and Polymarket offer a vision of online betting that covers a broader range of topics, sets prices algorithmically and is based on cryptocurrencies.
Now, Kalshi – riding the wave of those accurate predictions, millions of new users and billions of dollars in trades – is expanding the range of things its users can bet on. Polymarket is courting political influencers like Nate Silver and ZeroHedge to pose questions that users can bet on. Robinhood and DraftKings also plan to get into the political betting ring. Will all public events soon be loaded with billions of dollars in online betting? Will the Oscars become a new kind of speculative financial market? Would you bet your life savings on whether egg prices will rise during Trump’s first month in office, a real bet you can make Kalshi?
The Guardian’s Callum Jones reports:
“We’re just getting started,” said Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour. Kalshi is adding “close to 100” new markets to its platform every day and plans to launch combination-based markets, allowing users to bet on a set of different outcomes and conditional markets (for example, “if Trump wins , where will the GDP be seen?”). be?”) in a few weeks. “I think it just accelerates from here…
Only “terrorism, murder and violence” are off limits to Kalshi. What about Ukraine? While the conflict falls under the platform’s banned category, the Russian invasion and resulting war has certainly moved stocks and commodities since February 2022. “We’ll see over time,” Mansour said.
This is all good news for Kalshi. Polymarket is having a quieter post-election party. Last Wednesday, the FBI raided the Manhattan home of 26-year-old betting exchange founder Shayne Coplan, seizing his phone and other electronic devices. The company was quick to attribute the 6 a.m. raid to “obvious political retaliation by the outgoing administration.”
Bloomberg, however, reported that the The US Department of Justice is investigating the company for allegedly accepting trades from American users, something it has been prohibited from doing since a 2022 settlement agreement with regulators. Users of the site, however, have gone to great lengths to bypass the geofence with virtual private networks. Two weeks ago, Polymarket announced that it would soon resume operations in the United States. It’s hard to imagine that reboot moving forward with an active FBI investigation into the company. Fortune also reported that wash trading, another illegal type of market manipulation, has supposedly proliferated on the site.
France is also grappling with the implications of the polymarket. A Frenchman with the username Theo made the site’s most famous bet, a nearly $30 million (£23.7 million) bet that Trump would win the US election. Do such massive bets constitute foreign electoral interference? Theo’s bet shows parallels with Polymarket itself, which is backed by American businessman Peter Thiel, who made an early and unexpected bet on Trump in the 2016 election.
France’s gambling regulator is investigating the site for any market manipulation, and cryptocurrency trading posts They have reported that the country is considering banning it. In response, Polymarket stated that it had seen no evidence of market manipulation.
Can Trump and Elon Musk weaponize America? Internet and satellite regulator?
On Sunday night, Trump announced that he would nominate Brendan Carr to head the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The conservative commissioner wrote a chapter on the future of the FCC for Project 2025 (the infamous far-right playbook for the second Trump administration), the only sitting government official to do so. Carr’s views on the US tech sector have mostly aligned with those of Trump and Musk. In recent months, everyone has criticized open television networks and public broadcasters.
Carr has advocated going after Meta and Google, not to lock them into monopolistic practices but to dismantle the “censorship poster” from big tech companies that he believes are stifling conservative discourse. Google, already reeling from the loss in its antitrust case against the United States, may be a big loser in the incoming administration, as Trump has criticized in campaign speeches. Carr has also supported banning TikTok over alleged national security threats.
Carr’s agency could be a political cudgel for Trump in his personal retaliation against technology companies. The commissioner is a friend of the telecommunications industry and an enemy of the technological giants of Silicon Valley. Will it take a hands-off approach to Internet service providers, dismantling consumer protections in a boon for the industry’s big incumbents, and then apply tough scrutiny and authority to companies like Google and Facebook, sacrificing consistency? in favor of political expediency?
“Brendan Carr has been campaigning for this position on promises to do the bidding of Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” said Craig Aaron, co-executive director of Free Press Action, a left-wing media advocacy organization. “Carr doesn’t care about protecting the public interest; “He got this job because he will carry out Trump and Musk’s personal vendettas.”
Carr could also turn the FCC into a commercial cudgel for the “first friend,” as Musk has called himself, against the billionaire’s technological rivals. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the commissioner’s promotion is likely to be Musk’s SpaceX, whose satellites and the internet service they provide are under the control of the FCC. In his Project 2025 proposals to the FCC, Carr emphasizes his priority of “promoting America’s space leadership.” He mentions the name Starlink (SpaceX’s satellite internet company) and says his agency will take as friendly a regulatory stance as possible toward the company’s launch schedule.
after newsletter promotion
Lock your phones
When everyone is digging for gold, sell shovels. This is what a company called Yondr has discovered. As schools around the world implement phone-free days and governments debate whether children should be banned from social media altogether, this brand has found a market opportunity. Founded in 2013, Yondr was one of the first companies to make lockable phone cases in which students (and others) can quarantine their devices. One million students use a Yondr bag daily in 35 countries, CEO Graham Dugoni told The Guardian.
Dugoni said when a principal, school district or state implements a phone-free policy, his company sees an increase in business. However, he was hesitant to use the word “ban” when referring to schools’ policies on phone use. “No one is doing anything wrong. And we’re not against technology as a company… It’s more about how to live with these tools in the future in a constructive way.”
Dugoni wants people to live in harmony with smartphones rather than banning them, although he uses a flip phone and does not maintain any social media profiles for himself or his company. “Creating a phone-free space is a positive development. It is not about removing something or returning to a world of the past. “This is how we create a framework and a social etiquette around something that is radically new and everyone tries to appreciate the potential and possibilities of the Internet.”