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Small businesses have always faced the same risks as big corporations: bad weather tanks foot traffic, surprise tariffs crush margins, an election reshuffles the regulatory landscape. The difference is that Goldman Sachs has a derivatives desk for that. Your local coffee shop does not.
Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated prediction market exchange, is trying to close that gap with a new AI-powered tool called Blanket. Developed in partnership with London-based financial economist Lauris Zminsky, the tool went live publicly this week after a quiet stealth period at tryblanket.app. Its pitch is straightforward: tell the AI about your business, and it will identify your risk exposures and recommend specific event contracts on Kalshi’s marketplace that could offset them.
What Blanket actually does
Blanket operates as a recommendation layer, not a trading platform. It doesn’t execute orders or handle any funds. Instead, it functions like a risk consultant that speaks in prediction-market contracts rather than hourly billing rates.
A restaurant owner worried about a brutal winter hurting weekend revenue could use Blanket to surface weather-related contracts on Kalshi. A manufacturer exposed to energy price spikes might find contracts tied to natural gas benchmarks. The AI does the diagnostic work, then points users to the relevant markets where they can place their own hedges.
Zminsky, who describes himself as a “forward deployed philosopher” on his X account, has stated his ambition bluntly: he wants “markets for all priceable states of the world.” Blanket is the first concrete product built on that thesis, translating abstract risk into specific, actionable contracts that non-experts can understand.
The tool was shared exclusively with Fortune ahead of its public debut, suggesting Kalshi is positioning this squarely as a mainstream financial product rather than a niche trading curiosity.
Prediction markets as business insurance
Kalshi has been quietly building the case for prediction markets as hedging instruments for months. One example that surfaced in June 2026: a New York City bar used the platform to hedge $5,000 against the outcome of an NBA promotion. If a particular result triggered a payout the bar had promised its customers, the Kalshi contract would offset the cost.
Blanket attempts to generalize the approach across entire categories of small-business risk. Weather, elections, energy prices, tariffs: these are all events that prediction markets can price with reasonable efficiency, and they’re all events that small businesses have historically had no practical way to hedge against.
Traditional hedging instruments, like futures and options on commodities exchanges, require minimum contract sizes, margin accounts, and broker relationships that effectively lock out anyone without institutional infrastructure. A farmer can hedge corn prices on the CME. A food truck operator cannot hedge against a rainy July without jumping through hoops that cost more than the hedge is worth.
Blanket’s value proposition is removing that friction. By wrapping Kalshi’s existing marketplace in an AI interface that speaks plain English, the tool lowers the knowledge barrier to something closer to filling out an insurance quote online.
Why this matters beyond small business
Blanket repositions Kalshi’s prediction markets as functional risk management infrastructure. That’s a meaningful narrative shift, especially for a company that holds CFTC designation as a regulated exchange. If small businesses start using event contracts the way they currently use insurance policies, the addressable market expands dramatically from speculation-curious traders to the roughly 33 million small businesses operating in the US.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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