Kalshi is adding new safeguards to prevent minors from using its prediction market platform, while resisting calls to raise the minimum trading age from 18 to 21.

Kalshi is a federally regulated prediction market where users trade contracts tied to real-world events, including politics, economics, and sports.

CEO Tarek Mansour said users under 18 are already banned, but the company is adding more controls to keep minors from using family accounts or other people's login information, according to reporting from Axios.

"We're essentially proactively doing that before we're required to do them because we think a lot of these measures are the right thing to do," Mansour said.

"The goal for Kalshi here is we want to set a ... new state-of-the-art benchmark when it comes to customer protection," he said.

The changes include facial recognition when users open the app, selfie requests for users flagged as higher risk, two-factor authentication, and a tool showing whether someone else has logged in using a customer's information.

Kalshi also plans to recommend deposit limits to users showing signs of excessive trading and may request proof of funds in some cases.

"If we see some signals that someone is doing something excessive, like repeated excessive losses and other things, we essentially start recommending deposit limits," Mansour said.

Mansour said that "most of the activity you see is healthy."

The company is also introducing Inner Circle, a feature letting users share trading activity with friends and family members, including parents.

The changes come as lawmakers, sports leagues, and researchers raise concerns about young people using sports betting and prediction market platforms.

A study by Common Sense Media found that 36% of boys ages 11 to 17 said they gambled in the past year, including 49% of 17-year-old boys.

"The harms of sports gambling are disproportionately concentrated among younger men, and so the prediction markets are clearly the new frontier in this conversation about sports gambling," Jonathan Cohen, policy lead at the American Institute for Boys and Men, said in a recent interview.

The NBA and PGA Tour have called for prediction markets to raise the trading age to 21.

"Like sports betting, trading in sports prediction contracts carries material risks (e.g., of financial loss) that may be particularly acute for younger individuals," said Dan Spillane, NBA executive vice president.

Mansour said Kalshi believes the minimum age should remain 18 because prediction market trading should be treated the same as equities trading.

"They should be treated the same," Mansour said.

In related action, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Dave McCormick, R-Pa., have proposed legislation that would ban members of Congress, the president, the vice president, and senior executive branch members from trading on prediction markets.

• Texas Targets Prediction Markets Over Gambling Concerns
• CFTC Sues New York Over Prediction Markets Crackdown