Oceans of Wisdom

Anthropic going a bit above and beyond because they are sortof doomers

EU AI Act mostly

@[simo] were are our expanders!

correct!

i have known him a long time

he has been on the side of the good guys from a long time ago

we need our alums to go global

6529 network infiltrating the institutions lol

The network state grows stronger

This Jeopardy! Champion Is Leading Kalshi’s Perpetual Futures Business By Nick Devor Follow Updated Aug 12, 2026, 11:10 am EDT / Original Aug 12, 2026, 11:00 am EDT Kalshi is developing perpetual futures for gold, silver, and platinum—all assets with lots of trading history to look at. (Gabby Jones/Bloomberg) Kalshi’s exponential growth would have been impossible without regulatory approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which cleared the way for the prediction market’s event contracts. Few are more responsible for securing the commission’s green light than Jeff Bandman, a six-time Jeopardy! champion who spent years in leadership roles at the CFTC. He left in 2017, launched a consultancy, and was working as a sort of CFTC-whisperer when he took a meeting with Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. The two needed help getting their idea for a federally-regulated “everything exchange” off the ground, and say they were spurned by some 65 lawyers before calling Bandman. He was the first to bite. At their initial meeting, Bandman explained the CFTC’s inner workings and what approval for their idea would take. He workshopped their approval application and joined the nascent start-up in January 2019 as its head of regulatory strategy. When Lara and Mansour first visited the CFTC’s Washington, D.C. headquarters that September, Bandman was there, too. Seven years and billions of dollars in event contract trading later, Bandman is returning to the firm after a two-year hiatus to run Kalshi Prime, the business that will spearhead Kalshi’s push into yet another new financial product: perpetual futures. Unlike traditional futures contracts, perpetual futures—often called “perps”—have no fixed expiration date. The contracts are basically bets between two traders on whether the price of an underlying asset will go up or down. One trader is long and the other short; every few hours the losing trader pays the other. Traders can also apply leverage to their positions. Since perps trade 24/7, a highly-leveraged trader risks exposure to price swings that could see their entire position automatically liquidated at any hour. The most popular perps are tied to cryptocurrency prices, though some platforms, including the international version of Polymarket, offer perpetual futures on stocks. Other offshore platforms offer leverage as high as 50-to-1. Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of Barron’s. In the U.S., perps are bought through CFTC-regulated futures commission merchants, or FCMs, the futures market equivalent of a broker-dealer in the equities market. Kalshi Prime is Kalshi’s FCM. “Jeff believed in Kalshi when most people thought it could never be regulated,” Mansour, Kalshi’s CEO, said in a press release. “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.” Bandman is a bit of a CFTC nerd and, considering his status as a Jeopardy! champion, this reporter felt compelled to request some trivia. Bandman obliged: “Before becoming an independent agency in 1975, the CFTC was previously part of this segment of the U.S. government.” (What is the Department of Agriculture?) After the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Bandman says he called Mansour to suggest Kalshi make a push into perpetual futures. The CFTC has been supportive of the products, approving them in May. But perps have their share of critics. When the CFTC requested public comment on perpetual futures in April, 2025, consumer-advocacy nonprofit Better Markets wrote that perps’ “round-the-clock trading model, synthetic pricing mechanisms, and infinite duration are more reminiscent of speculative gaming than structured risk management. Retail investors lured by the promise of 24/7 trading and high leverage may unknowingly assume excessive risk, often with little understanding of how these contracts function or how losses can rapidly compound.” Bandman says that detractors of perpetual futures conflate offshore platforms and U.S. platforms. “In a CFTC-regulated market, you have a proper market surveillance program,” he says in an interview with Barron’s. “All the market participants are onboarded and [have their identity confirmed]. You know who all the people are, so you’re not just trading against North Korea or market manipulators.” He sees echoes of the critiques of event contracts, where potential for manipulation in prediction markets has been a source of consternation for legislators. Bandman recently shared news of his return to Kalshi with a friend who then brought up concerns around insider trading and identity verification. “I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re talking about offshore Polymarket!’” Bandman replied. “It’s like a family where there’s two siblings. And one of them, they work hard and do their homework. And then there’s the younger sibling that just goes and does whatever they want and is constantly getting in trouble, and whenever they do something the older sibling gets blamed for it,” he says. “I see that happening constantly in the Kalshi-Poly dynamic.” In a statement, a Polymarket spokesperson said the company “surveils and monitors for insider trading and other illegal activity, consistent with other markets. The transparency of the blockchain provides the public with a real-time view of all trading activity, which allows us to efficiently identify and trace potential wrongdoers, as well as allowing the general public to flag suspicious trading activity.” As for Kalshi, “They have spent so much time and resources pushing hit pieces on [CEO Shayne Coplan] and Polymarket to the detriment of both companies and the industry at large.” Another difference Bandman cites is how offshore platforms set the available leverage. “No major regulator is going to allow 100-to-one leverage on these things,” he says. “I don’t think 100-to-one leverage is calculated based on safety.” The CFTC itself doesn’t set a hard limit on the leverage regulated perp platforms can offer. “Under CFTC oversight, leverage ratios are set pursuant to a platform’s risk management framework,” the agency wrote in a consumer education one-sheet issued when it approved perpetual futures in May. Barron’s asked if Kalshi has set a limit on the amount of leverage it will offer. Bandman says consumer safety factors into how the platform determines available leverage, adding that there is a “judgment call.” The primary way leverage limits are calculated is through historical modeling of volatility in the underlying asset, which Bandman says he has experience with from his time leading the CFTC’s division of clearing and risk. Kalshi is developing perps for gold, silver, and platinum—all assets with lots of trading history to look at. “And we have a vision for introducing this perps model to other products as well,” Bandman says. “In setting your risk management framework, you look at the history including not just how things behave on sunny days but also how they behave on stormy days.” The number of FCMs has dwindled in recent decades amid consolidation in the financial sector. In 2015, a CFTC commissioner called FCMs “an endangered species.” At the end of 2004 there were 190 FCMs, according to CFTC records. Today there are 73. With Kalshi Prime, Kalshi is hoping to disrupt yet another industry. “Something we’re looking into is to give people more flexibility about the types of collateral they can use,” Bandman says. He brought up corporate bonds, stablecoins, and money-market-funds as examples. That is all subject to regulatory approval, he adds, but “we want to find ways to innovate, not just in our products, but in our services and to revisit how this regulated infrastructure, the FCM, can find new ways to help customers in the derivatives industry.”

and the Barron's article announcing his new job

gm "Kalshi is announcing today that Jeff Bandman aka @[6529Guardian] is returning to become CEO of Kalshi Prime, their CFTC-registered FCM" A few thoughts: 1/ This is a great job for Jeff and he obviously has to take the job! This is arguably the platonic ideal job for Jeff. When he told me it was offered, within 30 seconds of him telling me, I was like "bro, you must take this" (master of the obvious, he knew that without me telling him ofc) 2/ Jeff was involved with Kalshi from ~ the beginning. He helped them figure out how to get federally regulated when this was considered somewhere between "unusual" and "no chance". His main (but not only*) role at 6529 was helping us through a different version of the same exercise. Some of the "behind the scenes stuff" that people don't see is actually hard and important in crypto/NFTs (e.g. having bank accounts so we can pay fiat obligations!) *he ambassador-ed at some art world stuff too! 3/ Now he gets to do it again for a third time at Kalshi but with everyone watching him. 4/ This is all super friendly. We are good friends, we are all all on great terms and he and I talk constantly. 5/ Also he has promised me that his absolute first priority is ensuring that Kalshi does a 180 on their perp plans and instead launch perps for Meme Cards 6/ I look forward to the not-wholly-sane-parts of the timeline losing their minds that "WE TOLD YOU IT WAS A CFTC DARK OPS TO HOLD DOWN THE REAL ARTISTS (TM)" 7/ We are in good shape. A lot of what Jeff spent the last few years helping us build is now built. We are at a different stage [blah blah blah insert boring GPT stuff that you can just hallucinate on its behalf] - anyway we are in the "hard-core" coding part of the cycle, we have our (hallucinate a lot of boring but important infra) all in place So: big congratulations to @[6529Guardian]. We are going to miss having him around every day, we are grateful for everything he built here, and I am happy for him. 🫡

so I think this type of "help prep my proposal" is a good use of AI, but it should not be in the main museum chat. we should have a different place for this

1/ see if there are learnings we could leverage from main stage 2/ also I think in general long posts should have a lower limit on text (across all ways) before you have to hit expand to see the rest of them (separate but related topic share your views and tag @[simo]

section 1, first bullet is duplicative and last line of first section is confusing take it out delete and repost

as a proposal

I think we should make a proposal something like this: 1) through 12/31/2027 and renewable through rollovers 2) the museum will not acceed Meme Cards, Gradients, NextGen, Meme Lab or ReMemes 3) the reasons as above @[punk6529bot] can you write it up and submit it

literally every single person who is "not us" will roll their eyes into the back of their heads

is deciding that the greatest digital/network art in the world is the one we produced

obviously the last place we should start to prove that point

the purpose of the museum is demonstrate we can perform art curation, scholarship, and education at the level of a leading contemporary/digital art museum

good, bad, indifferent the world already agrees that we can select meme cards

nor will it demonstrate anything that we have not previously demonstrated

This will not add any value to the world

the purpose of the 6529 Network Museum is not to once again tell ourselves how great the meme cards are

The idea being that: a) we have a site/network/brand focused on the meme cards, b) we have research wallets full of meme cards and the punk6529 wallets relating to meme cards

We discussed this early but we need to formalize this into a decision

Meme Cards are not going to be part of the museum at this stage

thanks, I will check

@[punk6529bot] is it me or is this "PARTICIPATORY" term a bit less clear than it should be? and is there an complexity you had to work around to post this vs a normal chat - expand on this pls

1. I think anything approved with a meme card, restricted or not is fine because it has already passed a TDH gate 2. Any restricted ETH gift has to pass a vote 3. Unrestricted ETH/USDC/etc is ok, does not need a vote

https://6529.io/waves/5f207393-5418-4a75-8738-e40edb44a94d?drop=6387c484-c602-4a2f-8d8b-456395cf077f

i updated the proposal on gift approvals based on some discussions with @[Cuttle] latest one here

@[punk6529bot] is there any actual formal way to withdraw a proposal in this repo? delete? withdraw? something else whatever the version is, we should just do that and leave the group with 1 and only 1 clean proposal to vote on

@[punk6529bot] because I am going AFK, you have my authorization to update the resolution (withdraw and put a new one) with these enhancements

1/ Try to express your views above in a fully laid out and organized policy 2/ would you withdraw the proposed resolution in favor of one with this enhancement?

@[punk6529bot] what do you think about the above?

and I do not want that responsibility

i have no idea if any particular NFT or ERC-20 is going to go up or down in price

and I don't even know what would even be the framework to make such decisions

there is nobody available and responsible for handling this

the museum is not a trading operation

probably the policy on "we are donating anything to you other than a major" should be "that is fine, but we are selling it to get a major"

and remember all the weird stuff where people would donate meme tokens to Vitalik

bc there are all types of weird edge cases along the lines of "but I donated to you my valuable Squiggle but you did not sell it at the right time etc etc etc"

3/ We probably should have to approve "gifts of things that are not these things"

2/ We could probably accept unrestricted ETH, USDC, USDT etc without preapproval

1/ major fungible tokens with 'restrictions' e.g. I am donating 10 ETH so you can buy Casey Reas peices should be preapproved

I think for the other items that @[Cuttle] said

Obviously gifts of NFTs should be approved