{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"A2Z Fintech","title":"S2E16 — Polymarket, Kalshi and the People Who Knew First","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2578,"description":"A US Army sergeant bet roughly $33,000 on Polymarket on an arrest he had just been briefed on, and turned it into the price of a house. A Google engineer read his own company's unpublished data and moved about $1.2 million into a private wallet.On a public blockchain, both men left a trail the FBI could follow to the cent. That is the paradox at the centre of prediction markets: the transparency that makes them exploitable is the same transparency that makes them honest. Between September 2025 and April 2026, combined monthly volume on these prediction markets climbed from under $5 billion to about $24 billion, and in October 2025 the parent of the New York Stock Exchange committed around $1.6 billion to the largest of them.Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala break down how prediction markets went from a forgotten Wall Street betting ring to information infrastructure, and the harder question beneath the boom: when a market knows before the news does, is the system working perfectly, or is it being robbed?Key takeaways:1. The transparency that makes these markets exploitable is exactly what makes them honest: the engineer who hid behind a wallet was traced by the same chain he trusted.2. The political framing is a myth. On Kalshi, 80% of volume is sports and just 4% is politics.3. ICE bought the data, not the casino: roughly $1.6 billion for a live probability feed it can sell to every bank and hedge fund on its network.4. Volumes ran from under $5 billion a month to about $24 billion in seven months, with Piper Sandler projecting $8 billion in annual revenue by 2030.5. A prediction market is not an oracle but a mirror, only as honest as the room it is in.Topics covered:- The two cold-open exploits: a Fort Bragg sergeant and a Google engineer who bet on what they already knew- The intellectual lineage: Hayek on price as information, Hanson's futarchy, Tetlock's superforecasters- Wall Street's unregulated political betting ring, and the $10m wagered on the 1916...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/7Qyf0xWmHeg7LEUFCI-k-jpWOtyK3SxMMPFnu7Noa5M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84ODdh/NDVjNDFmYzZiMzFj/OWY5MzM3YjExNDAw/YTQ4NC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}