Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of Kalshi, has pledged to “overturn the ban” the prediction markets platform has been hit with in Brazil.
A native of Belo Horizonte and former ballet prodigy, Lara believes that Kalshi was banned due to an unfair determination taken by the National Monetary Council (CMN).
On 24 April, the CMN instructed Banco Central do Brasil to prohibit prediction market products after ruling that financial derivatives could not be linked to sporting, political or entertainment outcomes.
The council’s intervention was partly aimed at protecting the legal scope of Brazil’s Bets regime, which came into force on 1 January and governs the licensing and taxation of online gambling operators.
Speaking to Folha de S.Paulo, Lara argued that regulators had misunderstood Kalshi’s business model and had grouped the US prediction exchange alongside 27 unrelated platforms offering speculative event contracts.
“We are going to try to explain what we do, because it was more a lack of knowledge than anything else,” Lara noted.
“Kalshi doesn’t make money when people lose. That’s a very important difference,” the executive added.
Predictions – finance or gambling?
Kalshi’s position reflects a broader dispute over whether prediction markets should be treated as financial products or gambling services.
The exchange maintains that users trade contracts tied to the outcome of future events, rather than placing wagers against a bookmaker.
Lara, alongside Kalshi co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tarek Mansour (CEO), stand by the firm’s distinction that its prediction markets offered should be viewed under the oversight of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Kalshi, and other prediction markets like its main rival Polymarket, argue that this distinction it believes separates it from traditional betting operators.
Lara indicated that the company would seek dialogue with Brazilian authorities rather than pursue immediate legal action.
“It will be faster than in the US, where we have been working since 2019,” she said.
“We want to work constructively with the government.”
Backed by leading venture capital investors, Kalshi is now valued at approximately $22bn a figure that rivals the corporate valuations of some of the world’s largest gambling groups.
Kalshi representatives believe the ban stemmed from a lack of regulatory familiarity with prediction markets, which should be categorised and interpreted differently from the online gambling provisions set under the Bets Law — the regulatory framework that has governed online gambling in Brazil since January 2025.
For Kalshi, Brazil represents the latest battleground in a wider international debate over the classification of event contracts.
The backdrop of Brazil’s October 2026 election may offer Kalshi its best route to entry. The Bets Law is viewed as a failed experiment by President Lula and the PT government, who have vowed to repeal and replace the law with significantly tighter controls on debt, advertising and licensing.
Meanwhile, bargaining has begun in Congress between political blocs to determine which party or senator will take the initiative to terminate the Bets Law and bring an end to its maligned existence, which has divided sentiment across the political spectrum of Brasília.
Change is also afoot in Kalshi’s home nation of the US, though it is looking much more positive for the company. Under the second Trump administration, the CFTC has become much more friendly towards prediction than it was under Joe Biden’s presidency.
Yesterday, the regulator published a 247 page set of proposed rules governing the predictions space.
These rules, if approved in a final review, will give an official greenlight to the sports event contracts operated by prediction platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket in the US, though hypothetical casino-esque markets will not be allowed.
Platforms will also be required to work with integrity monitoring organizations, perhaps an attempt to ease fears that sports integrity could be impacted by the still-relatively-unregulated predictions space in contrast to the regulated betting space.
