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Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

Watch Fortune Daily, our new video show that brings you inside the Fortune newsroom and the boardroom

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Exclusive: Kalshi launches ‘Blanket’ to help small businesses hedge against risk—with help from the guru of ‘hypergamblification’

An independent financial economist has partnered with Kalshi on a new AI tool on top of the prediction-market exchange that aims to help small businesses hedge against everything from bad weather to election shocks—without hiring a Wall Street bank.

The tool, called Blanket, quietly launched in stealth at tryblanket.app and is going live publicly this week, according to materials shared exclusively with Fortune and an interview with its co-creator, Lauris Zminsky, a London-based founder who calls himself a “forward deployed philosopher” on his X account, where he says he wants “markets for all priceable states of the world.”

Blanket is “powered by Kalshi,” meaning it routes users to Kalshi’s CFTC-regulated prediction markets, but it was built and owned by Zminsky, who does not work for the company.

Zminsky, a former consumer fintech founder and trained financial economist, said he began experimenting with Kalshi’s event contracts late last year as a way to prove that prediction markets could have “true, durable economic use” beyond pure speculation. His first project, built with a Kalshi employee, aspires to match S&P 500 companies’ risk factors with existing Kalshi markets. Blanket, he says, is the self-serve evolution of that idea for Main Street rather than the S&P. Zminsky told Fortune he has been working often with Kalshi because of overlapping social circles—”a bunch of my friends … actually work at Kalshi and do a lot of great stuff with Kalshi”—and was coy about whether he may go in-house some day.

After Kalshi launched a promotion with sports bars in May, Zminsky told Fortune, he had an idea: “What if you actually can take this up a notch and build a tool that is not only probably useful for the Kalshi team and their endeavors—to scale their S&P insurance hedging initiative—but a self-service tool where anybody can come in if they own a small business?” Off a prompt, he added, a reasoning engine could be designed to help these small businesses figure out what kind of Kalshi markets could help them run a promotion or hedge against a core business risk.

This may not be transformative for how small businesses run, Zminsky cautioned, “but you can definitely de-risk a lot of your balance sheet exposures” by finding the right markets and sizing the bets correctly. Blanket’s pitch is simple: A bar owner, laundromat operator, or regional........

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