Tarek Mansour, co-founder of Kalshi market forecasting, provided an update following the platform’s decision to cancel some open positions following the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“We don’t list markets directly related to death. When there are markets whose potential outcomes involve death, we design rules to prevent people from profiting from death. That’s what we did here,” Mansour said in an article on X.
Iranian official media reported the death on Sunday morning, after an attack launched the day before by Israel and the United States.
Kalshi is reimbursing all market fees to “Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader” and will pay traders with positions opened before Khamenei’s death according to the “last price traded before his death,” Mansour said.
Additionally, users who opened positions after Khamenei’s death were refunded the difference between the highest entry price paid and the last traded price.
Source: Tarek Mansour
A Kalshi spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the platform’s policy prohibiting “death markets” is clear and long-standing.
The platform reiterated this policy on Saturday, and Mansour said the death exclusion stipulations were clearly spelled out in the market’s rules. However, the decision sparked backlash from online users, who accused the platform of cutting into users’ profits.
The market for predictions for the ouster of Iran’s supreme leader. Source: Kalshi
Suspicions of insider activity on prediction market platforms rise amid geopolitical tensions
In February, six traders, according to forecasts by rival Polymarket, earned about $1 million betting that the United States would launch a strike against Iran before the end of the month.
The six wallets were created in February, primarily betting on markets linked to a strike on Iran, and some positions were filled hours before the first explosions were heard in the Iranian capital, Tehran, according to Bloomberg.
The trading patterns have raised suspicions of insider trading activity among onchain investigators and analysts.
In January, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the individual who leaked information related to the raid and capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had been arrested by U.S. law enforcement.
The comments fueled speculation from on-chain analytics platform Lookonchain that the leaker Trump was referring to may have been linked to winning bets on Polymarket placed shortly before the US raid in Caracas.
