Ishan Shah

People are overreacting to this. Wouldn’t surprise me if Kalshi does the same thing in two weeks.

Someone sees LeBron in an ad and a $25 signup promo, downloads the app, and wants to bet on football this Sunday. I doubt checking the taker fee coefficient is next on his list.

Once the intro discount ends, the lowest-volume tier pays about 63 cents more than Kalshi on 100 contracts at 50¢. Is he really withdrawing his money and signing up somewhere else over that?

If you’re trading all day, obviously that adds up. But the person putting $50 on a game is probably using whichever app already has his money in it.

I don’t like the increase either, but I think people here care about it a lot more than the customers paying it. If those customers keep betting, Kalshi is probably wondering how much more it could charge too.

We built something better than perps, options, and binary contracts on @tradeupdown

We wanted a way to get your buy-in back if you get the direction right, and make more money the further price moves your way.

Put in $10 on Up. If BTC finishes on the winning side, you get your $10 back, and if it finishes further above your entry, you can win even more.

That’s Boost.

With perps, BTC can dip enough to liquidate you before finishing exactly where you thought it would. Getting the direction right doesn’t help if your position is already gone, and the more leverage you use, the less room you have to survive that dip.

Boost has no liquidation price or funding payments, so your trade gets the whole window to play out. Only the close counts, and your maximum loss is what you put in.

Regular binaries give you that simplicity, but pay the same whether you win by $1 or $1,000. You can catch the biggest move of the month without earning anything extra for it.

Boost pays more as price finishes further past your entry in your direction, up to 100× your buy-in. A regular binary can pay more on a small win because some of your Boost buy-in pays for the extra upside.

Options reward bigger moves too, but BTC can go up and your call can still expire worthless. You have to choose a strike and expiry, then get a move big enough to cover the premium.

Boost packages that into an Up or Down trade.

I keep coming back to how simple the original opinion is: “I think BTC finishes higher.” Somehow trading that opinion became a question of liquidation prices, collateral, strikes, and breakevens.

I wanted to put in $10, get the direction right, and still have my $10, with a bigger payout if BTC kept running.

Excited to officially launch @tradeupdown with @alliance !

Trading is getting faster. 0DTE options and short-term prediction markets are taking off, but most platforms still make trading short-term moves more complicated than it needs to be.

We're building a simpler way to trade whether stocks, crypto, and pre-IPO assets go up or down over the next 5, 15, or 60 minutes.

Huge thanks to the Alliance team for backing us. Still early, lots more to come.

one of the biggest bottlenecks for us right now is just having enough liquidity as volume grows

finally opened up the @tradeupdown API so anyone can quote our markets

if you market make or run a trading system and want to plug in, dm me

probably the clearest signal yet that prediction markets are becoming trading products more than forecasting products

the fastest growing non-sports category isn’t politics or the fed, it’s 15 minute crypto

pretty much the thesis behind what we’re building at @tradeupdown