A Cheeky Pint• Mar 17, 2026• 1:16:58Interview

Creating prediction markets (and suing the CFTC) with Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara

Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara•Co-founders, Calci

Executive Summary

Calci, a US-based prediction market, successfully sued its regulator, the CFTC, to enable trading on US elections, a pivotal moment that solidified its legal standing.
The company has experienced explosive growth, with monthly trading volume exceeding $10 billion, demonstrating significant market adoption.
Unlike sports betting platforms, Calci operates on a transaction-fee model similar to a stock exchange, with liquidity primarily provided by over 2,000 individual market makers.
Calci is expanding beyond binary prediction markets to create futures markets for non-traditional assets, most notably GPU compute time, aiming to become the world's largest derivatives exchange.

12 quotes

Concerns Raised

Navigating ongoing regulatory complexities as the platform scales and introduces new products.
Ensuring adequate customer protection and education as the user base expands from sophisticated traders to the mainstream public.
Maintaining capital efficiency for market makers, especially for long-term contracts.

Opportunities Identified

Creating first-of-their-kind futures markets for novel asset classes like GPU compute time.
Expanding product offerings to include more complex derivatives like swaps and options.
Leveraging their regulatory clarity in the US to capture market share from offshore competitors.
Partnering with AI labs to use prediction markets as a benchmark for AI model forecasting capabilities.

Key Themes

Regulatory Strategy and Confrontation

Calci deliberately pursued a 'permission-first' approach, spending years working with the CFTC before launch. This culminated in a successful lawsuit against the agency to list election markets, establishing a strong, defensible regulatory moat in the US.

This case study challenges the 'ask forgiveness, not permission' startup ethos, demonstrating how a proactive and even confrontational regulatory strategy can be critical for long-term success in highly regulated industries like finance.

Prediction Markets as Financial Infrastructure

The founders' vision is not just a consumer app, but the 'next-generation New York Stock Exchange.' They emphasize a financial market structure with transaction fees, not a gambling model where the house profits from user losses, and are building sophisticated products like futures and swaps.

This positions prediction markets as a serious financial tool for price discovery and risk management, capable of attracting sophisticated participants and expanding beyond niche topics into mainstream economic hedging.

The Future of Tradable Assets

Calci is actively exploring and building markets for novel asset classes underserved by traditional exchanges, such as GPU compute time, collectibles, and other digital or real-world commodities. This involves developing new market structures beyond simple binary contracts to accommodate these assets.

This signals a major expansion in what can be financialized. Creating liquid derivatives markets for assets like compute power could fundamentally change how industries procure resources and manage price volatility.

Democratization of Market Making

Over 95% of the liquidity on Calci is provided by thousands of individuals and small shops, rather than large institutional players. The platform uses fee structures to incentivize this pro-social behavior of providing liquidity, creating a distinct market ecosystem.

This model demonstrates how modern platforms can create deep liquidity without relying on traditional institutional market makers, potentially leading to more resilient and accessible financial markets.

Information vs. Speculation

A large majority of Calci's users (approximately 80%) primarily use the platform to consume information rather than to actively trade. The market prices serve as a real-time, aggregated forecast on various outcomes, highlighting the platform's dual use as both a trading venue and an intelligence source.

This underscores the value of prediction markets as a data product. For analysts and decision-makers, the market-implied probabilities can be a powerful, continuously updated signal for geopolitical, economic, and technological forecasting.

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Topics

Prediction Markets Regulatory Strategy CFTC Financial Regulation Derivatives Futures Markets Market Making Liquidity GPU Compute Alternative Assets Fintech Exchange Business Model Election Markets Stripe Connect Insider Trading

Processed May 10, 2026 yt-dlp + mlx-whisper + Gemini

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