Tarek Mansour: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, exactly. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange. So brokers can connect to us. You can go to Robinhood to trade stocks. You can go to Robinhood to trade on Kalshi, same with Coinbase or whatever. And it's always been part of how we think about... We always wanted to be an exchange and a clearinghouse first, and actually connection to a Goldman Sachs or Robinhood is very important for how we thought about this ecosystem as a whole. In the beginning of last year, we launched the first broker partner that we had was actually Robinhood and then Webull. And at the start, actually, when we were starting to ramp up, the brokers were a very, very big part of kind of how we started growing, which was actually very great because the brokers bring so much demand. Then we get all the market makers to come in because they want to trade against retail flow. And then we could kind of buy ourselves time to ramp up the direct product a lot, to where it is now. But basically how you think about it is, well, we really are at the core is an exchange and a clearinghouse, and then you can access us through our app, website, API, but also any broker. We're investing more into institutional now, international brokers, so you can be in Brazil and you can trade on Kalshi, all those things. They're coming soon. But on the numbers, you can take it. I mean, maybe we won't share numbers, but what we call direct, Kalshi Direct, which is our Kalshi.com, Kalshi app, the consumer business. That has grown. That has sort of dramatically outpaced the rest, our other sort of intermediary or broker business. And I think it's just that the brand has gone mainstream. I think people, when they think about, have a difference of opinion on something, it's sort of becoming synonymous to like, "Oh, let me pull up Kalshi and see the odds," or "Let me sort of place a position on Kalshi. " And that's contributing... There's just a lot of organic growth now. And I think that's going to continue over the next few months. You're describing how you grow the individual retail side of the market, whether people are coming through brokers like a Robinhood or people coming directly to the Kalshi website. There is also, when you're an exchange like this, you have to spin up market making. And in the end, the New York Stock Exchange doesn't have to think too much about market making because just the economic incentive is there. And so when something is at large scale, that's not as big of an issue. But I'm curious what that was like in the beginning. Were you guys doing the market making? Did you work with market-making partners? Now, how do you incentivize market makers to participate? I'm just curious what the market making scale-up has looked like.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.