Mudslinging Sullies Prediction Markets Just as Sector’s Prospects Brighten
The post Mudslinging Sullies Prediction Markets Just as Sector’s Prospects Brighten appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Kalshi may have tarnished its regulatory halo by slinging mud at a competitor. Late Friday, Pirate Wires, a technology and culture publication owned by Founders Fund marketing executive Mike Solana, published a bombshell of a story. It documented how Kalshi, the U.S.-regulated prediction market, paid social media influencers to disparage crypto-based, offshore rival Polymarket and its CEO Shayne Coplan after the FBI raided Coplan’s home this month. Solana (no relation to the $120 billion cryptocurrency) disclosed up-front he had reasons to be biased and report what Kalshi allegedly did: Founder’s Fund is an investor in Polymarket, and Pirate Wires has a paid partnership with Polymarket for ads, among other things. Nevertheless, Solana wrote, “receipts are receipts,” and the screenshots in the Pirate Wires article paint a damning picture. One screenshot showed Kalshi employees asking former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown to quote-tweet a post about Coplan with the comment, “this [n-word] seem[s] guilty.” Brown obliged. Another influencer, who regularly tweets Kalshi-related content, called Coplan a “lookalike” of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, misleadingly implying that the former committed comparable crimes. (According to The New York Times, the raid was part of an ongoing investigation into whether Coplan ran an unlicensed commodities exchange; Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud.) Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour declined to comment when contacted by CoinDesk. The Pirate Wires article caused an uproar on X. Jeff Park, head of alpha strategies at Bitwise Investments, accused Kalshi, which has long touted its status as a regulated entity, of “moral hypocrisy.” Retaliation? Someone — it’s not clear who — apparently decided that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and launched a retaliatory smear campaign. Shortly after Pirate Wires ran its piece, RawsAlerts, a news aggregator, posted on X that Kalshi is under investigation by “multiple agencies,” including the…
Filed under: News - @ November 25, 2024 10:21 pm