Kalshi saw more than $1 billion in trading volume on Super Bowl Sunday, reaching a daily record high, according to CEO Tarek Mansour.
That volume was up 2,700% year-over-year, according to the company. The platform allows users to buy event contracts for outcomes in politics, pop culture, financial markets and sports.
“It was an incredible weekend,” Mansour told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday. “Kalshi was the biggest brand of the Super Bowl this year, without running a Super Bowl ad, and the way we achieved that is the product.”
Mansour said the trading volume for halftime performer Bad Bunny’s opening song exceeded $100 million, while bets on who would perform with Bad Bunny surpassed $45 million.
The platform’s Super Bowl contracts were not without bumps, though. Co-founder Luana Lopes Lara posted on social media during the game that some users’ deposits were delayed due to high traffic.
“Your money is safe and on the way, it will just take longer to land,” she wrote.
Kalshi has recently come under fire along with other prediction markets as skepticism around the industry builds, with concerns of insider trading. Last week, before the Super Bowl, the platform announced additional efforts to expand its surveillance and enforcement efforts to identify and remove accounts participating in insider trading.
“The insider trading risk is very real for the stock market as well,” Mansour said on Tuesday.
“As a regulated financial market by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, we have the same rules as the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, and we have the same mechanism of enforcement,” he added.
Over the past year, Mansour said the platform has run 200 investigations and frozen the relevant accounts, with some of those referred to law enforcement for prosecution.
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a minority investment.
