Words move markets which is why Mentions is the most important category on @Kalshi.
Mentions is the greatest game ever created.
Mentions presents the perfect mix of luck and skill. It's incredibly simple yet infinitely adaptable and, sometimes, profoundly complex. It's social but can be played solo, it's data driven yet vibe based, and it can be played dynamically or passively. Everyone is primed to participate, even the GOATs lose sometimes, and anyone can win. Who doesn't want to play that game?
Mentions is the foundational substrate and cultural substrate of prediction markets.
Mentions can be played in virtually every situation and added on to virtually every market. As such it attracts the entire gambit of traders and serves as the connective tissue for all PMs by funneling capital to the astute traders who then branch out and fuel the truth machine. Mentions is also an incredible training ground for PM trading. Anyone who can learn to succeed at mentions will succeed in other categories.
Mentions is spiritual.
In John I the Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And what was God’s first action? To speak. "Let there be light." Mentions is a game based on words, rooted in thought manifest, and predicated on the quintessential question that drives human civilization and the universal consciousness:
What is the next idea?
In this way Mentions is not just a game, but rather it elevates and refines who we are and what we aspire to be.
Mentions is Innovative, but it faltered.
In spite of all this, it seems to me that the category has not been managed as well as it could have been, and the results have been a gutting of the category. Whether this was because of incompetence or legal of financial shackling, I cannot say, but from the outside looking in all seem like plausible/contributive explanations.
The Kalshi team was clearly understaffed and slow to evolve and update Mention contracts. They didn't listen to the Mention traders, and they handed down frequent all-or-nothing misresolves with virtually zero resolution transparency. The result was that every trader was, at some point, livid at the process and left without an explanation, and many traders felt betrayed, abused, and downright stolen from.
PMs need Mentions.
Mentions has earned its gutting, but it must make a comeback, and with the right management I believe it will. Until then I think @Kalshi will suffer in ways that are difficult to understand. It is my belief that as long as Mentions is restricted, PMs will be unable to achieve their full potential.
Words move markets.
Words move markets because words are the manifestations of our thoughts. Once this is fully understood then it becomes clear that Mentions is the most important category on Prediction Markets and is vital to Kalshi achieving its full potential.
Fellow mentions traders, I believe this day will go down in mentions history…
Hochul is notorious for her technical glitches, weird Q&A pump fakes, and rugs.
But this… this took a level of craft and expertise that even Leavitt throwing down a closed presser last second couldn’t dream up.
Hochul wasn’t satisfied with a single fake out. She hid her stream link behind several riddles and disguised dead ends. Then, she revealed the link to us and dm’d Jake to add it in Kalshi… and once she did she limited it to 50 people to cause max confusion and immediately said “sorry lol” and dm’d Jake to take it down from the Kalshi website… really a masterful thing of beauty.
I’m glad to have been a part of it. From up $2.5k pre market, down $3k, to settle on $
-$1k down.
A fair price perhaps. But I believe that price was still too low. The experience of this event was priceless.
This event, that will go down in history as the epic “Hochul Double Rug”.