Kalshi has appointed Jeff Bandman to lead the operator’s Kalshi Prime business, which serves as a futures commission merchant (FCM) registered under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to offer trading on perpetual futures contracts.
Bandman previously led Kalshi’s regulatory strategy from January 2019 to July 2024, as well as oversaw the CFTC’s Division of Clearing and Risk and Office of International Affairs.
Having been “instrumental” to Kalshi’s “regulatory-first approach,” Bandman assisted the operator in achieving its regulatory status with the CFTC and launching trading capabilities in 2021.
According to the release, Kalshi Co-Founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara were told by over sixty lawyers that gaining such regulatory status was “impossible” prior to contacting Bandman.
“Jeff believed in Kalshi when most people thought it could never be regulated,” Mansour said.
“He helped us turn that idea into a CFTC-designated exchange. There is no one better to lead the FCM that will power Kalshi's next chapter.”
Most recently, Bandman served as COO and General Counsel of 6529 Holdings and 6529 Capital, an institutional manager for digital assets.
Kalshi stated perpetual futures – which track whether the price of an asset moves up, down or remains unchanged rather than attaching a specific date – represent the operator’s “most significant product expansion” since introducing event contract trading.
"Our goal is to build the FCM of the future, rethinking from first principles what an FCM can be and designing it around how derivatives markets and their customers are evolving, not how they operated decades ago,” Bandman said.
“As the industry has consolidated and customer choice has diminished, we see an opportunity to use modern technology and the flexibility of a non-bank FCM to serve the full market: institutions, individual investors and the farmers, producers, merchants and businesses that use derivatives to manage real-world risk."
In legal news regarding the operator, FlightAware filed a lawsuit against Kalshi on August 11 following its decision to allow for contracts tied to flight delays and cancellations at every airport in the US.
FlightAware alleges Kalshi named the service as its primary source agency for settling flight cancellation markets, but was not previously granted use of the platform's name, data or trademarks.
A Connecticut federal court denied Kalshi’s preliminary injunction motion against state regulators on August 10, ruling sports-event contracts cannot be defined as ‘swaps’ under the Commodity Exchange Act
