By Daniel Davis, Chief Revenue Officer, Connamara Technologies.
Every prediction market operator knows the clock is running. The opportunity in this sector is tied to things that happen on fixed dates: an election, a championship final, a central bank decision, or a geopolitical flashpoint. But if a venue isn’t trading before the event, it doesn’t earn a share of the interest that builds beforehand. That much is well understood, and it’s why “time to market” has become the phrase on everyone’s lips.
But getting there in time is only half of what matters, and it’s the half that gets almost all the attention. The other half determines whether a launch actually pays off. The same event that opens the window also creates the load. The election that draws the crowd is the election night when volumes spike, prices move in bursts, and everyone tries to act at once. Get to market fast, and you’ve earned the right to be tested at the worst possible moment, on the busiest night, with the most people watching. Speed gets you to the start line. What happens under that traffic decides whether you finish.
So the more useful way to think about readiness isn’t “can we launch in time?” It’s “can we launch in time and still be standing when the event we launched for actually happens?” Those are different questions, and they place very different demands on the technology.
The spike is the product, not the exception
In most asset classes, peak load is something you plan around: market opens, closes, and the occasional volatility event. Capacity planning assumes a baseline with predictable surges on top. Prediction markets invert that. The surge is the business. A contract on an event exists precisely because people want to trade around the uncertainty, and that trading concentrates in the hours when the uncertainty resolves. A platform sized for normal conditions and stress-tested for “a bit more than normal” is sized for the wrong thing entirely.
This is why launching fast on infrastructure that hasn’t been through a real event is a risky bet. The first major event a venue hosts shouldn’t be the first time its systems meet the kind of traffic that the event produces. If it is, the operator is running a live experiment with its reputation at stake, and in a market where participant trust is hard won and easily lost, a single visible failure on a high-profile night can undo months of careful launch work.
What “standing up under load” actually demands
Surviving the event isn’t a single capability. It’s several, and they have to hold together at the same time.
Capacity has to scale with the moment, not with the forecast. When perceived outcomes shift rapidly – a result comes in, a game turns – order flow doesn’t rise politely. It jumps. The matching engine has to absorb large numbers of trades and individual contracts without degrading, and capacity has to be there when the event dictates rather than when a planning cycle predicts it.
Risk has to keep pace with trading, in real time. Event contracts often have correlated outcomes, and the moment volumes spike is precisely when those correlations matter most. Buying power and collateral calculations that lag the order flow are worse than useless in a fast-moving market; they either choke legitimate trading or let exposure build unseen. The risk layer has to move at the speed of the book.
And the venue cannot go dark for maintenance. Events don’t observe trading hours – a contract can resolve at three in the morning local time, on a weekend, or on a public holiday. A platform that needs scheduled downtime is a platform that will, sooner or later, be down for the very event it was built to capture. Continuous, always-on operation isn’t a premium feature in this market. It’s the baseline condition for being in it.
Speed and resilience aren’t a trade-off – if the foundation is already proven
Faced with all this, it’s tempting to conclude that doing it properly means doing it slowly – that building for the spike, testing against real load, hardening the risk engine, and engineering out the maintenance windows is exactly the multi-year programme the calendar won’t allow.
That conclusion only holds if every operator has to build the foundation from scratch. They don’t. The way to reconcile speed with resilience isn’t to cut corners on one to protect the other; it’s to launch on infrastructure where the resilience is already there – proven in live trading, under real events, before your venue ever goes near it. Production-ready integrations to the systems a venue depends on – trading and order management, pre-trade risk, clearing and settlement, surveillance, market data, banking – mean an operator isn’t building and hardening each of those connections from zero while the clock runs. The hard engineering has been done and tested. The operator’s job becomes configuring and launching, not inventing and hoping.
That’s the combination prediction markets actually require: fast enough to catch the window, and proven enough to survive what comes through it.
The case for a tested foundation
EP3® by Connamara Technologies pairs the speed-to-market advantage of a ready-to-deploy platform with the resilience required for event trading, including true 24/7/365 availability with no maintenance window shutdowns. Its exchange, clearing, and surveillance components are designed to scale with event-driven volume and to keep pre-trade risk and collateral calculations running in real time as the book moves. And because EP3 has been in production across regulated prediction markets since 2024, operators launch on a foundation that has been tested by live events rather than one that they are meeting for the first time.
The operators who will define this sector aren’t simply the ones who launch first. They’re the ones who are still trading, cleanly, when the results come in, and everyone is watching. Getting to market quickly matters. Being ready for what the market throws at you on its biggest night matters just as much.
To discuss how EP3 fits your prediction market requirements, visit www.connamara.tech or download our Guide to Prediction Market Technology.
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