Trading Technologies has announced that it will support client execution on Kalshi, the largest US federally regulated prediction market, with trading expected to go live on the TT platform in the third quarter. It is the first regulated prediction market TT has connected to, and the firm frames it as the first of several regulated event venues to follow. What TT is bringing is not only a front-end screen but the execution and post-trade clearing infrastructure its institutional clients already run elsewhere.
A demand picture that turned in six months
The starting point, on TT’s side, is how recently the institutional appetite materialised. Alun Green, EVP, Managing Director, Futures and Options at Trading Technologies, dates the change precisely. “Last December, when I spoke to all our sell-side customers, they said, ‘Look, we’re banks, we don’t touch that. None of our customers are asking for it,'” he tells TradingTech Insight. “Since then, that has changed completely and turned around.”
On the buy side, what Green now describes is a market led by a handful of hedge funds, some at the speculative end, alongside early interest from treasury-type players in certain corporate markets who are starting to ask whether event contracts could hedge risks they have previously had to accept. On the sell side, he points to six or seven leading firms wanting early-adopter positions and a wider group monitoring the readiness of the infrastructure. The regulated, onshore nature of the US market is part of the pull: firms already active in unregulated event markets elsewhere, Green says, are moving to do the same thing in a regulated form.Pipes and plumbing, not screens
TT can move quickly because, for its institutional clients, this means extending what they already run rather than building something new. “We have connectivity to that market from an execution perspective, and we also have connectivity from a clearing perspective, because we’re not just an execution provider – we’re a post-trade clearing provider as well,” he says. “A lot of clients are using us for both, and they say, ‘We’re using your pipes and your plumbing – can you just extend us out of that?'”
The model echoes the path TT took in fixed income, where connectivity to central limit order book venues was in place years before the on-screen tools were reshaped for fixed income traders rather than futures and options desks. With prediction markets the firm is leaning on API-based access rather than screens, because the institutional clients asking for connectivity are not retail screen traders – they want to reach the venue from their own systems alongside everything else they trade.
Green is also careful not to oversell the hedging case, which remains more potential than practice. “There’s liquidity in particular products, but the market has to evolve a little before we’re sure which products will be sufficiently well traded to make sense,” he says.
A bigger market than prediction alone
If TT supplies the institutional-grade connectivity and clearing, Kalshi is building the venue it connects to – and the venue is no longer only about prediction markets. Andy Ross, Head of Institutional at Kalshi, frames the exchange as running two distinct product sets. The first is the prediction markets themselves; the second is perpetual futures, which went live in early June as the first CFTC-regulated perpetual contracts offered on a US exchange.
The early perpetuals figures are substantial. Public reporting put volume above $1 billion within the first week of launch and around $5.5 billion across the opening fortnight, with several individual days above $1 billion coinciding with the FIFA World Cup and the NBA Finals. Kalshi positions the onshore, regulated nature of its Bitcoin perpetual against the offshore crypto market, which it puts at more than $90 trillion in annual volume in 2025, up from $28 trillion two years earlier – the upper end of a range, with independent data such as CryptoQuant’s putting 2025 offshore crypto perpetuals nearer $62 trillion. Ross points to a product roadmap – subject to CFTC approval – that would add further real-world assets.
“You’ve got prediction markets and perpetuals, with retail and institutional engagement on both,” Ross says. “With new products in the pipeline, it feels like a compelling story.” The product-generation point is not abstract. Kalshi has spun up markets on niche risks – Ross cites a contract on California solar tax credits that he recalls traded several hundred thousand dollars largely as block liquidity – and is building contracts around events such as El Niño weather patterns. Brokers, he says, are bringing client demand and the exchange is designing products that can be broked between two institutional sides, with blocks trading on payoff structures such as whether equities will sit above or below a given level.
How institutional is it, really?
For all the momentum on both sides, neither claims the institutional market has arrived. Green’s demand picture is one of interest and early positioning more than committed flow. Ross, asked where the genuine gaps lie, reaches past execution and data to a single missing piece: the banks.
“When bank FCMs start going live on Kalshi, I think you’ll have a real sense that the institutional side has taken off and become embedded,” he says, “because they won’t do that unless their clients are clamouring for access.” Much of the apparatus is in place; the bank clearing members who would mark institutional participation at scale are, for now, still a target rather than a fact.
The data case underneath
Where Ross plants Kalshi’s longer-term defensibility is not liquidity but the quality of its prices. “The payoff structure on Kalshi isn’t about whether you’re quickest or whether you’ve got the most money to put around – it’s about whether you’re right,” he says. The result, on his account, is that forecasting accuracy rather than speed or capital determines who profits, which sharpens the read the market produces on the events it covers. Kalshi runs around 8,000 markets, Ross says, most of them actively traded.
That data case is no longer resting on the exchange’s own telling. A Federal Reserve staff working paper examining Kalshi’s data found that the mode of the Kalshi distribution has matched the realised federal funds rate by the day of each meeting since 2022, a record neither surveys nor futures pricing achieved. And on 24 June, Tradeweb launched a dedicated Kalshi pricing page giving US institutional clients access to event contract data, the first phase of a previously announced partnership in which Tradeweb is also a minority investor. Kalshi’s American Power Index, a market-implied gauge of US political and policy risk, is due to follow in July.
The launch puts Kalshi’s prices in front of the desks Tradeweb already serves in rates, credit and equities. Troy Dixon, Managing Director, Co-Head of Global Markets at Tradeweb, says: “Our clients want access to that signal within the workflows they already use. Integrating Kalshi’s data into Tradeweb places it alongside the data, analytics and execution tools clients rely on every day to manage and transfer risk.”
Kalshi and Tradeweb have said they are exploring an institutional-focused platform for event contracts, combining Tradeweb’s role in macro risk trading with Kalshi’s depth in macroeconomic and policy outcomes. That direction of travel is the wider point the Trading Technologies integration sits inside. Green notes that institutional interest in prediction markets has rekindled appetite for other non-traditional products within the CFTC-regulated framework, – crypto and intraday power among them – a sign that event contracts may be less a standalone novelty than the leading edge of a broader expansion of what fits inside the regulated derivatives perimeter. The connectivity going live in the third quarter is one move in that expansion. The marker worth watching is the first bank FCM that follows the flow onto the venue.
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