Small and medium-sized businesses often face the same uncertainties as large corporations—unpredictable weather, fluctuating fuel costs, election-related policy shifts, or even the financial impact of promotional campaigns—but rarely have access to sophisticated risk management tools.
A new artificial intelligence application called Blanket aims to change that by connecting these firms to regulated prediction-market contracts.
Developed independently by London-based financial economist and former fintech founder Lauris Zminsky, Blanket launched publicly this week after a quiet stealth period at tryblanket.app.
The platform is described as “powered by Kalshi,” the CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, meaning it directs users toward Kalshi’s existing yes-or-no markets.
Zminsky owns and built the tool; he is not a Kalshi employee, and the exchange’s compliance team was not involved in its creation.
All actual trading, account verification, and regulatory processes remain entirely on Kalshi’s platform. Blanket itself functions purely as a discovery and reasoning engine—no funds pass through it, and users cannot execute trades within the application.
The process is straightforward. A business owner describes a specific concern in plain language—for example, the potential impact of hurricane season on a Florida operation, rising diesel prices for a trucking company, or an unusually mild winter affecting a seasonal restaurant.
Blanket’s AI analyzes the input, scans available Kalshi contracts, and suggests markets that could provide a partial financial offset if the undesirable outcome occurs.
Responses typically arrive in about 30 seconds and include explanations of how each contract relates to the stated risk, along with modeling of potential costs and payouts under different scenarios.
The tool can also indicate when no suitable market exists or when a proposed hedge appears mismatched.
Zminsky, who refers to himself as a “forward deployed philosopher” and advocates for markets covering “all priceable states of the world,” began exploring Kalshi’s event contracts last year.
He sought to demonstrate that prediction markets can deliver lasting economic value beyond speculation.
An earlier project focused on matching risks for large S&P 500 companies; Blanket extends that concept into a self-service format tailored for Main Street businesses.
Inspiration partly came from Kalshi’s own promotional partnerships with sports bars earlier in the year.
The goal, according to Zminsky, is to help owners de-risk balance-sheet exposures by identifying appropriate markets and sizing positions carefully, without the need for a Wall Street intermediary or direct sales outreach.
Kalshi has positioned small-business hedging as a significant growth area.
Nicolas Hull, who oversees the exchange’s efforts in this segment, noted that more SMBs are already using the platform to protect against weather anomalies, sports outcomes, freight costs, and tariff changes.
Blanket is intended to lower the barrier further by offering an accessible on-ramp.
Kalshi emphasizes that its contracts are standardized, transparent, and federally supervised, distinguishing the approach from traditional opaque derivatives while drawing parallels to historical risk-transfer mechanisms such as early insurance markets.
While prediction markets continue to spark debate about the line between hedging and speculation, Blanket focuses on practical risk reduction.
Business owners retain full control: they review recommendations and decide independently whether to trade on Kalshi. In an environment where many smaller firms lack dedicated risk teams or affordable insurance for certain exposures, tools like this seek to democratize access to event-based protection.