Donald Trump Jr. Joins Prediction Market Kalshi Ahead of Dad's Inauguration

Donald Trump Jr. joined prediction market operator Kalshi as an advisor Monday, deepening the company's embrace of U.S. politics.

The president-elect's son will advise Kalshi on partnerships and go-to-market strategy "as we scale and aggressively expand the business" a Kalshi representative told Decrypt.

Kalshi is a trading platform that enables users to place wagers on the likelihood that a future event will happen. Its popularity skyrocketed last fall when its bettors correctly predicted that Republican candidate Donald Trump would win the U.S. presidential election.

“Don Jr.’s bold vision and deep expertise perfectly align with our mission to reshape how America engages with information,” Kalshi said Monday in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “His guidance will help accelerate our expansion and push prediction markets into the mainstream.” 

A Kalshi representative declined to disclose the terms of its agreement with Donald Trump Jr., including how, if at all, Don Jr. will be compensated under the deal. 

Kalshi is the first prediction market to legally offer U.S. politics-focused contracts to American traders. It has continuously operated betting pools on U.S. congressional races and the presidential election since last October, when a federal appeals court sided with the platform in its two-year court battle against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or CFTC.

Since that time, Kalshi has amassed more than $500 million in wager volume on its U.S. presidential election contract, which closes on Inauguration Day (January 20), according to its website. 

The Commission's lawyers attempted to block Kalshi from offering U.S. politics-focused prediction markets, arguing the contracts could undermine faith in the U.S. voting system. It's unclear whether the addition of the President-elect's son will change the tenor of Kalshi's regulatory scrutiny, though that could shift anyway based on impending leadership shakeups at agencies. 

Prediction market proponents say that such data provides valuable insights into democratic processes, providing temperature checks on how voters feel about particular candidates. They argue that traders’ predictions on Kalshi and other platforms could provide a more accurate glimpse into the outcome of future events than traditional polling data.

Edited by Andrew Hayward