Luana Lopes Lara was 27 years old when she decided to sue the U.S. government before the 2024 election.

The Brazilian-born co-founder of Kalshi won unanimously, clearing the way for federally regulated election contracts and a company now valued at $22 billion.

Lopes Lara told Coin Stories host Natalie Brunell this week that 65 lawyers said the idea was impossible before a single one agreed to take a meeting with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

From Bolshoi Ballerina To Billionaire

Lopes Lara trained eight hours a day at the Bolshoi Ballet’s only school outside Russia before pivoting to MIT, where she met co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour.

The pair worked together at Citadel and Five Rings Capital before launching Kalshi out of Y Combinator.

The regulatory fight took roughly four years of back-and-forth with the CFTC. Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel told her during the slog to ignore the people who said it could not be done.

“They’re just people like you,” Seibel said, according to Lopes Lara. The line became something close to a company motto.

Beating The CFTC With One Month To Go

After the CFTC blocked election markets twice and pushed Kalshi out of the 2022 midterms, Lopes Lara had to convince a more risk-averse Mansour to sue.

The decision came during what she described as a one-to-two week stretch of layoffs and staff departures, with some employees telling her the team was “insane” for refusing to abandon the election idea.

The unanimous win in October 2024, with all four judges Democratic appointees, unlocked the contracts that pulled the platform into the mainstream.

Kalshi now controls more than 90% of the U.S. prediction market category, according to Lara, with over 10,000 active markets up from 30 at launch.

The company recently announced its first international partnership, with Brazil’s largest brokerage, and is targeting Latin America and Southeast Asia next.

Why It Matters For Public Markets

Robinhood Markets (NASDAQ:HOOD) routes prediction market orders to Kalshi and remains the cleanest public proxy for the platform’s growth. Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN) has integrated Kalshi contracts as part of CEO Brian Armstrong’s “everything exchange” pitch.

Lopes Lara said Kalshi will likely move on-chain within five to 10 years, a shift that may further blur the line between prediction markets and crypto rails. The company has already partnered with Hyperliquid on a proposal to bring fully collateralized binary contracts on-chain.

The Forbes billionaire status, she said, was incidental.

“Nothing really changes. I’m in the office 12 to 16 hours a day,” Lopes Lara said. “It’s just my favorite thing.”

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