GMentioning presidential election results became legal in the United States in early October after being banned for decades, marking a new type of pre-election polling. Online prediction markets such as Calci and Polymarket accept billions of dollars in bets on the outcome, with users out of sync with mainstream polls that gave Donald Trump a 70% chance of winning over Kamala Harris. The Trump campaign touted this prediction.
Election gambling is legal in the UK, but takes a very different form. Traditional bookmakers and betting companies take players’ bets and set prices and odds. This betting is less similar to a prediction market than it is to horse racing. These markets are prone to their own scandals. Kalshi and Polymarket offer a vision of online gambling that covers a wider range of themes, is algorithmically priced, and relies on cryptocurrencies.
Now, Kalsi is riding the wave of these accurate predictions, gaining millions of new users and billions of dollars in trade value, expanding the scope of what users can bet on. Polymarket has courted political influencers like Nate Silver and ZeroHedge to ask questions that users can bet on. Robinhood and DraftKings also intend to throw themselves into the political gambling ring. Will every public event soon have billions of dollars in online wagers? Will the Oscars become a new type of speculative financial market? Would you bet your life’s savings on whether the price of eggs will rise in the first month of President Trump’s inauguration? This is a real bet you can place on Karsi.
Callum Jones of the Guardian reports:
“We are just getting started,” said Tarek Mansour, CEO of Karshi. Kalsi is adding “nearly 100” new markets to its platform every day, and is based on combinations that allow users to bet on a bunch of different outcomes or conditional markets (e.g. “What will happen to GDP if Trump wins?”) We plan to launch a market for ) within a few weeks. “I think it will accelerate from here…”
For Karshi, the only things off-limits are “terrorism, assassinations, and violence.” What about Ukraine? Although the conflict falls under the platform’s banned category, the Russian invasion and subsequent war have certainly moved stocks and products since February 2022. “Time will tell,” Mansour said.
That’s great news for Kalsi. The polymarket is making the post-election party much quieter. Last Wednesday, the FBI searched the Manhattan home of gambling market founder Shane Coplan, 26, and seized his cell phone and other electronic devices. The company quickly blamed the 6 a.m. attack on “clear political retaliation by the outgoing government.”
However, Bloomberg reported: The US Department of Justice is investigating The company is suspected of accepting transactions from users in the United States, but has been prohibited from doing so since a settlement agreement with regulators in 2022. However, users of the site have done their best to circumvent geofencing using virtual private networks. Two weeks ago, Polymarket announced that it would soon resume operations in the United States. With an active FBI investigation looming over the company, it’s hard to imagine it will reopen. Fortune also reported on another type of illegal market manipulation: “wash trading.” It is said to have been proliferated on the site..
France is also grappling with the effects of the polymarket. A French man with the username “Theo” made the site’s most famous bet. It was a bet of around $30 million (about £23.7 million) that Trump would win the US election. Do such huge bets amount to foreign election interference? Mr Teo’s bet is similar to that of Peter Thiel, the US entrepreneur who made an unexpected early bet against Mr Trump in the 2016 election. It is similar to the polymarket itself supported by
France’s gambling regulator is currently investigating the site for market manipulation. Cryptocurrency industry publications It was reported that the country is considering banning it. In response, Polymarket said it saw no evidence of market manipulation.
Can Trump and Elon Musk weaponize the US? Internet and satellite regulator?
Late Sunday, President Trump announced his nomination of Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). A conservative committee member wrote: Chapter on the future of the FCC He joined Project 2025, the second Trump administration’s infamous far-right strategy, and was the only current government official to do so. Mr. Carr’s views on the U.S. technology sector are largely in line with those of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk. In recent months, they have collectively criticized broadcast television networks and public broadcasters.
Rather than be bound by exclusive practices, Kerr said, “censorship cartel” He believes that statements from big tech companies are stifling conservative speech. Google is already reeling from losing an antitrust case against the United States, and with President Trump slamming Google in his campaign speech, it could be a big loser in the next administration. Carr also supports banning TikTok due to its alleged national security threat.
Mr. Carr’s agency could become a political bludgeon for President Trump in his personal vendetta against technology companies. He is a friend of the telecommunications industry and an enemy of Silicon Valley’s big tech companies. He applied a hands-off approach to internet service providers, dismantling consumer protections that benefit the industry’s largest incumbents, and then sacrificing consistency in favor of political expediency, including Google and Facebook. Will it apply oversight and strict powers to things like that?
“Brendan Kerr campaigned for this job promising to be at the mercy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” said Co-CEO of left-wing media advocacy group Free Press Action. says Craig Aaron. “Kerr doesn’t care about protecting the public interest. He took this job to carry out a personal vendetta against Trump and Musk.”
Mr. Kerr also could turn the FCC into a commercial weapon against his billionaire tech rivals, “First Buddies,” as Mr. Musk himself christened them. The main beneficiary of the commissioner’s appointment is likely to be Musk’s SpaceX, whose satellites and the internet services it provides fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC. In his Project 2025 proposal to the FCC, Carr emphasizes the priority of “advancing America’s space leadership.” He cited Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet company, and said his agency would adopt the friendliest possible regulatory stance on the company’s launch schedule.
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Please lock your phone
When everyone else is digging for gold, sell shovels. A company called Yondr discovered this. The brand saw a market opportunity as schools around the world implemented No Phone Days and governments debated whether children should be banned from using social media altogether. Founded in 2013, Yondr was one of the first companies to create a lockable phone pouch that allows students (and others) to isolate their devices. CEO Graham Dugoni told the Guardian that 1 million students across 35 countries use Yondr pouches every day.
Dugoni said his company sees a spike in business when principals, school districts and states implement no-phone policies. However, he was hesitant to use the word “ban” when referring to the school’s policy on phone use. “No one has done anything wrong, and we are not anti-technology as a company… rather, it’s about how we constructively interact with these tools in the future.”
Dugoni doesn’t want to ban smartphones, he wants people to live in harmony with them, but he uses a flip phone and doesn’t control any of his or his company’s social media profiles. . “Creating a phone-free space is a positive step forward. We’re not trying to take anything away or pull us back into the world of the past. In doing so, we’re creating a fundamentally new and no-one They create a framework and social etiquette around what they are trying to understand about the possibilities and possibilities of the Internet.”
Wider TechScape
Source: www.theguardian.com
