Kalshi helped set up 2024 FBI raid of arch-rival Polymarket CEOs apartment: report
Prediction market Kalshi helped tee up a November 2024 FBI raid on the apartment of its arch-rival Polymarket’s CEO – part of a series of blows the companies have traded during their yearslong feud, according to a report that cited Polymarket sources.Before the raid, Kalshi attorneys met with prosecutors in Manhattan to amplify their concerns about Polymarket’s business, the New York Times reported.In those meetings, the lawyers reportedly detailed to officials how Polymarket’s platform operates, including how US users could still access its markets despite restrictions intended to keep Americans off the site. Not long after, FBI agents used a battering ram to bust into Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan’s apartment before dawn on Nov.
13, 2024 — part of an investigation into whether Polymarket illegally allowed Americans to place bets on its platform.Coplan publicly called the search nothing more than political retaliation by the Biden administration.But privately, he and other Polymarket executives reportedly grew convinced that Kalshi’s top brass had helped put federal investigators on their trail.Polymarket execs speculated that someone working for Kalshi — or acting on its behalf — had tailed Coplan, spotted federal agents outside his apartment on the day of the raid and quickly tipped off journalists to get the news to spread quickly, the Times reported.The anecdote was just one of the examples of the brutal tit-for-tat between the New York-based startups as they battle for pole position in the burgeoning prediction market sector. Both platforms allow users to bet on everything from the weather and geopolitical events to sports.Kalshi is led by co-founders and co-CEOs Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, who met while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started the company in 2018.The bad blood between them and Coplan, who launched Polymarket in 2020, stretches back years.
During one early meeting, Coplan trie...