Kalshi Announces New Insider Trading Policing Features
Kalshi is cracking down on alleged insider trading on its platform.
Tarek Mansour announced a suite of new initiatives to combat insider trading on its prediction market exchange. Mansour’s post included a breakdown of some of the features it already had in place, including software that flags certain trades.
He also pointed to new hires who will further bolster Kalshi’s efforts to police insider trading. They include a white-collar criminal attorney and a new partnership with Solidus Labs
On Insider Trading.
Some say insider information can make prediction markets more accurate. But the same argument can be made for stock markets, where insider trading is banned.
Insider trading erodes trust. When people believe a market is unfair, they stop trading. Liquidity…
— Tarek Mansour (@mansourtarek_) February 5, 2026
Mansour’s announcement follows a few high-profile accusations of insider trading, including the platform’s Spotify markets.
Alleged Spotify insider
When he was trading in the market for Spotify’s top song, Gaeten Dugas noticed a 50-cent jump in Olivia Dean’s song, Man I Need. The spike came within a minute after the data was released, making Dugas suspicious that an insider was trading instead of an especially sharp trader.
In an interview with Novig, Dugas drew a line between information that is publicly available but difficult to find and information that only an insider could have access to. The size, timing, and precision of the trades made Dugas suspicious of an insider and temporarily kept him from trading in that market.
Dugas’ suspicions highlights a conundrum for prediction markets and a CFTC supportive of many new kinds of event contracts.
Confidentiality by federal law
CFTC investigations must remain confidential as a matter of federal law. Confidentiality prevents money from fleeing a market under investigation and is a crucial part of the process.
However, that confidentiality also fails to inspire trust in traders who are used to otherwise rapid responses from the exchanges they use. The CFTC secured a fine of $14 million against a Texas man on Feb. 2, 2026. That fine stemmed from a complaint filed in February 2022, four years earlier. A four-year investigation doesn’t address trust issues that modern event contract traders experience.
Kalshi may have improved its insider trading detection. But its agency and Congress will have to modernize investigations to build trust in prediction markets, too.