Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour reportedly announced a new strategy for the prediction markets platform to crack down on minors illegally using its services.
According to a Wednesday Semafor report, Mansour said that Kalshi was launching a “portal for parents” to submit their identification to check whether their children were using the platforms under their names. There have been incidents in which minors have been able to bypass Kalshi’s age requirements — a US-based user must be 18 years old — by using one of their parent’s IDs for verification.
“We are also adding selfies to accounts, where you can basically look at the face of a person, and it can tell you obviously if this person is not the actual parent that’s 50 years old,” said Mansour, according to Semafor.
The CEO’s comments came as prediction market platforms come under scrutiny in the US, both by state-level gaming authorities for the companies’ event contracts related to sports and at the federal level for controversial bets on military actions.
Crypto exchanges have also been challenging Kalshi’s dominance in the market, with Binance integrating prediction market features in its wallet app last week, followed by Crypto.com partnering with High Roller Technologies in a similar move.
Related: Polymarket bets removed from Google News after brief appearance: Report
Central to Kalshi’s arguments in court is the claim that the company is under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal commodities regulator, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Michael Selig, who chairs the CFTC, has backed this position in an amicus brief in support of Crypto.com in its dispute with the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
Court battles continue over sports and election event contracts
As of Wednesday, many of the cases against Kalshi were ongoing at the state level.
A federal judge in Arizona blocked state officials from enforcing the state’s gambling laws as applied to Kalshi’s event contracts last week. The decision followed a similar outcome in New Jersey, where a federal appellate court sided with the company’s argument claiming that the Commodity Exchange Act — under the CFTC — preempted the state’s law on sports gambling.
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