📊 March Madness of Trading

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Here’s what we got for you today:

• 🏆 Kalshi launches new competition

• 🏛️ White House briefing raises eyebrows

• 📈 Market Moves

• 📊 Odds & Ends

Here's the thing about poker. It was just a card game until they put it on TV. ESPN started broadcasting the World Series, and suddenly you've got pros, sponsorships, and people watching from their couch. The leaderboard also made it real. You couldn't just say you were good anymore. You had to prove it.

Prediction markets are about to have their poker moment.

HumanPlane is running the first prediction market trading competition on Solana, powered by Kalshi. The Horizon S1 runs January 12-16 with a $5,000 USDC prize pool.

The details: HumanPlane built a trading interface on Solana that connects to Kalshi markets with the DFlow API. Participants compete over a fixed window, and the leaderboard tracks real P&L in real time.

Sure, Polymarket and Kalshi already have leaderboards. But an all-time leaderboard is different from a tournament. Tournaments have fixed start dates, level playing fields, and prize pools. Everyone begins at zero, and there’s no head starts from months of compounding gains.

Right now, everyone on X claims they have edge or a trading bot that prints them cash. They screenshot winning trades. They never post losses. It's hard to know who's actually good when someone's been trading for two years versus two weeks.

Tournaments change that. When you're competing over a fixed period with public P&L, there's nowhere to hide. You either have edge or you don't.

Polymarket already proved this works. Last November, The Genesis Cup hosted by Hive ran the first major PvP prediction market tournament with $10,000+ in prizes, two qualifying rounds, a 16-trader bracket, and a $200 buy-in. The organizers documented everything along the way.

Now Kalshi's getting its own version. The timing makes sense as Polymarket and Kalshi continue to find new ways to stand out. A trading competition is natural marketing: let your best users prove the platform works.

The poker comparison writes itself. After the World Series of Poker hit ESPN, it became a skill game with celebrities, sponsorships, and millions of viewers. Phil Ivey became a household name. Amateurs bought strategy books hoping to go pro. Not all of them should have. Mainstream attention brings money, but it also brings people who probably shouldn't be playing. Prediction markets will be no different.

DID THE WHITE HOUSE JUST MOVE A PREDICTION MARKET? 🏛️

Kalshi lets you bet on how long the White House press briefing will last. On Wednesday, things got weird.

People noticed Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt looked up at something, possibly a clock, right before wrapping up. "Thank you all very much. It's great to be back with you," she said, then sprinted off stage.

"Prediction market bros will tell you this isn't insider trading," one trader wrote. Others called for prediction markets to be banned entirely. Someone pointed out that if Congress bans stock trading for politicians, prediction markets could become the new loophole.

Here's the thing: nobody knows if anything shady actually happened. Maybe she just wanted to keep it short. Maybe she had somewhere to be. Maybe she's a degen who bet the under.

However, perception matters. Prediction markets live and die by trust. The moment people think outcomes are being manipulated, the whole thing can start to fall apart.

Kalshi's rules were clear: "Speaking will be measured from first word to last word. Pauses included." No ambiguity there. The market resolved correctly.

Still, "resolved correctly" and "looks clean" aren't the same thing. When someone with direct control over an outcome can move a market by checking a clock and walking off stage, it raises questions. And the fact there is no formal insider trading law to prevent this makes it even more concerning.

This alone won't get prediction markets banned. But it's a reminder that the closer these markets get to people with influence over outcomes, the messier things get. And the easier it is for critics to call for bans or stricter regulation.

MARKET MOVES 📈

ODDS & ENDS 📊

• Polymarket just became the official prediction market of the New York Rangers.

• Situation Monitor launches as a real-time command center for news, crypto, and prediction markets.

• Delphi Digital will now curate Polymarket markets and embed predictions directly in their research.

• Bitnomial gets CFTC approval for prediction contracts on crypto prices and economic indicators

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