Kalshi to allow trading on borrowed funds - Semafor

Kalshi will let users juice their bets with borrowed money — but only some, showing where the prediction-markets platform thinks its future lies. Kalshi asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to let it extend margin loans to customers, but is excluding sports, mentions, and culture bets from the product. That leaves the categories most attractive to institutional investors looking to wager on, or protect themselves from, big global events like elections and commodity prices.

Kalshi and Polymarket need to decide whether they want to be key players in the financial markets or degen OTBs. They are worth far more, I wrote this spring, as the place where Meta locks in AI compute pricing, Home Depot hedges its lumber risk, and investment firms manage the effect of a midterms surprise on their portfolios than as a betting parlor for US black-op nighttime raids. In that light, today’s announcement carries risks — leverage always does — but suggests Kalshi has made its choice. Polymarket, meanwhile, has some growing-up to do.