Lucas Martin Calderon

why did i become a prediction markets maxi ?

(opinionated take)

ai will endanger capitalism, as the output of elite education with raw intellect will become globally available and cheap

ai will endanger manual labor, as the human capital required for construction, mechanics, or even home chores will be priced at $1.50/hour with robots like tesla’s optimus

my take?
ai perfectly masters and replaces performance-oriented tasks (consulting, coding, manufacturing, trading, healthcare…), with entertainment and attention being the black sheep, or rather golden eggs here: “ai as the engine, and humans as the steering wheel” (@VitalikButerin )

a few years ago, prediction markets were sanctioned by the cftc, actioned through the fbi. today, every month polymarket and kalshi have billions worth of volume. tomorrow they will be bigger wrappers than the nasdaq and the collective “proof-of-stake” tool against a dangerously growing misinformation flywheel

without a shred of doubt, those companies that master attention, put humans in the steering wheel and go with the users already are, will undoubtedly win the game

DM if you are interested to be part of that new world

1/5 from my talk at the odds singapore:

permissionless market creation moves the bottleneck.

if anyone can create a market, who resolves it?

a central team cannot manually research every event, interpret every edge case and resolve millions of outcomes.

our answer at kash is an ai council that researches the event, checks the evidence against the market rules and reaches consensus on the outcome.

the creator cannot control the resolution, and the system can scale alongside market creation.

that is one of the many pillars that makes permissionless prediction markets possible.

big week, prediction markets roundup:

- jefferies said prediction market volume jumped 55% to a new record in october, underscoring the sector’s post-election momentum

- kalshi reported over $2.5 billion in trading volume for the midterm elections while claiming market favorites won 98% of resolved races

- river markets affiliate river finance registered with the cftc as a futures commission merchant and joined the national futures association to expand institutional prediction market infrastructure

- polymarket confirmed it will reimburse $3.9 million to affected traders following a supply chain attack involving a dns hijack at monitoring firm debugbear

- the philadelphia 76ers signed a multi-year deal making kalshi their official prediction-market partner, becoming the first nba team to partner with a prediction market

- phantom opened 15-minute bitcoin event markets to us users through kalshi, letting them trade regulated short-duration contracts directly in the wallet

- polymarket expanded its partnership with chainlink to launch real-time precious metals event trading for gold and silver

- the organizers of the ballon d'or filed a formal legal fraud complaint in france over suspicious polymarket betting patterns ahead of the award ceremony

which update stands out most?

the hard part of making markets permissionless isn't letting people ask questions.

it's making sure those questions can actually be resolved.

"will this go viral" sounds like a market. it isn't. viral by whose count, by when, measured how?

open creation without clear rules just creates disputes faster.

so the real design problem is a tension:

how do you make creation open and easy without lowering the quality of the market?

that's the part we spend the most time on.

crypto made every transaction public.

it did not make every relationship between wallets visible.

that distinction is becoming increasingly important.

a creator can show one public wallet while buying through several others. token ownership appears distributed, the promotion begins, followers enter - and only later does onchain analysis connect the wallets.

the blockchain recorded everything correctly. users still lacked the information that mattered when making the trade.

prediction markets offer a different structure.

on kash, the creator does not own the outcome. there is no hidden allocation to discover and no supply they can quietly sell.

they can promote one side as loudly as they want, but the community can take the other - and predetermined evidence decides who was right.

transparency is not only about making transactions visible.

it is about removing the hidden advantage in the first place.