Blanket, a new artificial intelligence tool powered by Kalshi, has launched publicly to help small businesses identify prediction markets that could be used to hedge against real world risks.
The platform was created by financial economist Lauris Zminsky and operates as an independent project that directs users toward contracts available on Kalshi, according to Fortune. Zminsky does not work for Kalshi and owns the Blanket platform.
Blanket allows business owners to describe risks affecting their operations, including hurricanes, higher fuel prices or unusually warm winters. Its AI reasoning engine then searches for relevant yes or no markets on Kalshi that could potentially offset losses if those events occur.
The application does not execute trades or handle funds.
“You can’t execute a trade. There’s no money moving through that application or system at all,” Zminsky told Fortune.
Users are instead redirected to Kalshi, where trade execution, compliance procedures and customer verification take place. Kalshi told Fortune that Blanket is an external project that references publicly available Kalshi contracts and that its compliance team was not involved in developing the product.
Blanket targets small business hedging
The tool expands on Kalshi’s push to position event contracts as instruments for managing business risks.
Kalshi has previously worked with businesses using contracts tied to events including weather, sporting events, freight costs and tariffs. Nicolas Hull, who leads Kalshi’s small business hedging efforts, described the segment as a major growth opportunity for the company.
Blanket is designed to make that process available without requiring businesses to first work directly with a Kalshi representative.
A typical Blanket request takes around 30 seconds to process and returns a selection of potential markets with explanations describing how each contract relates to the business risk entered by the user.
The platform can also tell users when no appropriate Kalshi market currently exists. In those cases, Blanket displays similar contracts and records the missing market as a potential signal of demand for Kalshi.
Kalshi operates as a federally regulated event contract exchange overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Its contracts allow users to take positions on the outcomes of events across areas including economics, politics, weather and sports.
