Build or rent? FX and CFD brokers looking to add event contracts face a familiar infrastructure choice: build their own venue or connect to an existing one. For Kalshi’s Head of Institutional Andy Ross, the answer starts with liquidity: “You want to go to the place that’s got all the liquidity.”
The liquidity argument also explains why broker distribution matters to Kalshi: each new connection can bring more participants to the same order book.
London's trading industry is coming home!
Ross said firms onboarding to or already trading on Kalshi collectively manage more than $1 trillion in assets. He described institutional involvement as a ‘significant proportion’ of activity and said institutions frequently trade against other institutions.
The broker channel, however, is only one part of its institutional strategy. The exchange is also adding perpetual futures, including planned FX products, and offering market data to firms that may use its prices without trading the underlying contracts.
Why Building an Exchange Does Not Build Liquidity
Kalshi has begun distributing its event contracts through existing brokerage platforms.
An API-based service launched with Apex Fintech Solutions allows brokers to add the contracts to their own interfaces without creating their own exchange and clearing infrastructure. tastytrade was the first broker to go live.
When asked why a broker should connect rather than build or acquire an exchange, Ross focused on order concentration.
He said that Kalshi’s advantage is the concentration of users “not just through brokers but directly on its platform” and institutional channels, which together are “creating this phenomenal price point.”
Similar event contracts may be available on several venues, but differences in settlement terms and wording can make them non-identical.
“You’ve got to be able to check: is the contract exactly written the same?” Ross said. “But if the products are somewhat analogous and there’s liquidity, then you can go trade on those if you want.”
“You want to go to the place that’s got all the liquidity and all of the pricing and all of the depth in the order book, so that when you put the trade on, you can also get out of the trade,” he added. “It’s important to be able to do that.”
How Brokers Can Add Prediction Markets
The Apex arrangement shows how a broker can give clients access to Kalshi’s order book without operating an exchange itself.
The broker retains its interface and customer relationship, Apex handles clearing, custody, money movement, statements and account management, while Kalshi operates the regulated marketplace and lists the event contracts.
“That client then can use that broker interface and stay in that broker’s ecosystem to be able to get access to prediction markets or get access to the perpetuals that are trading on Kalshi,” Ross said. “The client doesn’t have to go and sign up to seven new places if they want to do that, and so they get a consolidated risk report.”
For the broker, this expands the product range while keeping the customer on its platform. For Kalshi, it brings additional participants and fee-paying order flow.
“We offer an order book, and more people who come to trade on it, we get paid fees for that, obviously,” Ross said. “The quality of the market goes up. Therefore, trading volume goes up.”
He described the arrangement as a “win-win-win” for the customer, broker and exchange.
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Why Kalshi Is Expanding Beyond Event Contracts
The products available through Kalshi are also expanding beyond the event contracts on which the exchange built its business.
“People don’t just want prediction markets,” Ross said. “They also want to be able to trade on leveraged delta in perpetuals. And so we’re offering both.”
Kalshi has launched perpetual futures on cryptocurrencies and precious metals, extending the range on 6 October with US500, a contract linked to an index of 500 large US companies.
Today we launched the first stock index perpetual future in America. You can now trade a perp on the US 500, an index of America’s largest companies weighted by market cap. Stock index perps let you trade the broader market with greater capital efficiency and make it easier to do things like take a short position. Unlike traditional options and futures, they don’t expire, so there’s no need to roll over contracts or decide when to exercise an option. Gains and losses are tied directly to how much the market moves, giving you an efficient and straightforward way to ask the question: is the market going up or down? One perpetual contract concentrates liquidity instead of spreading it across expiration dates. Bringing more traders and competing views into a single liquidity pool on a national exchange can strengthen competition, improve pricing, and make markets more efficient over time. This launch brings us closer to building a financial exchange for anyone and everyone. Prediction markets gave traders exposure to the events that move the stock market. The US 500 is the natural next step: a way to trade on the market itself.
— Kalshi (@Kalshi) October 6, 2026
The company is looking to add FX perpetuals, although Ross did not identify the potential currency pairs or provide a launch timetable.
“We’re looking to launch FX perpetuals,” Ross added. Kalshi has also launched FX-related prediction markets, and Ross said “the two of them fit together.”
The statement confirms plans outlined in July, when Chief Risk Officer Udesh Jha said Kalshi was discussing an expansion into FX, metals and energy with regulators. At the time, Jha identified the three categories as those attracting the most investor demand.
Ross rejected the suggestion that adding conventional derivatives means Kalshi is moving away from prediction markets. Instead, he described event contracts and perpetual futures as complementary products that can be offered within the same asset class.
Event contracts allow users to trade a defined outcome, while perpetuals provide continuous directional exposure to an underlying asset.
“We started with these markets in prediction markets for crypto. Then we added delta,” he explained. “We’ve started in prediction markets for metals, and now we’ve added delta.” Kalshi has not disclosed whether it has submitted proposed FX perpetuals for regulatory review.
“They’re There Because Their Clients Are Telling Them”
Asked who is trading on Kalshi’s institutional side, Ross pointed to the scale of the firms entering the market. “We’re seeing people onboard or trading on the market who, if you added them all up together, have got more than a trillion dollars of assets under management,” he said.
Ross also pointed to futures commission merchants connecting to the exchange as evidence of client demand. “They’re not there because it’s really exciting for them,” he said. “They’re there because their clients are telling them, ‘No, no, I need you to do it.’”
“One of the naive things I thought was, the guys who do crypto, they’re going to do crypto, and the guys who do sports are going to do sports, and the guys who do politics are going to do politics because that’s their expertise,” Ross said.
“What I actually found is that because this is an exchange and it’s an order book and the messaging protocols are the same and the data coming out is the same, we actually have people who are interested in sports who also do crypto and also do energy products.”
“We’re seeing people trade on perps as well as prediction markets,” he said, adding that activity also covers weather, financial markets and idiosyncratic risks. Some institutions trade directly, while others use the prices in conventional markets.
Some institutions trade directly, while others use Kalshi prices to inform decisions in conventional markets. Ross described how that can work: “Kalshi could give you a price, and you could look at the Kalshi price and decide what you’re going to do with that on a legacy market.”
As one example, he pointed to nearly $50 million in trading on Kalshi’s market covering the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. He also recalled a conversation with the head of trading risk at a US oil major:
“The first thing he does in the morning when he wakes up is look at the Strait of Hormuz market, right before he gets out of bed.”
Ross has made the same argument outside the interview, linking the institutional value of prediction markets to continuous price discovery, central clearing and an open order book.
How Kalshi Uses Data to Grow Its Network
Kalshi has also listed markets at the request of individual institutions. Those firms may eventually want enough liquidity to trade the risk, but the immediate value comes from price discovery.
“Day one, there’s value in listing a market and having it priced,” Ross said. The resulting probability can inform decisions involving legislation or political developments that may affect positions in conventional markets.
“Some of it absolutely is a data story,” he added. “We have hundreds of people who have signed up to get data from us. We distribute data via a series of third parties as well.”
For now, wider distribution matters more to Kalshi than data revenue. “Zero per cent of our revenue comes from data monetisation. We charge zero fees for the data,” Ross said. “The more eyeballs you have on the data, the more interesting the market is.”
Kalshi may charge for some data products in the future, but Ross expects its top-of-book probabilities to remain public. “I’m not saying that we will charge zero forever,” he added. “I don’t think there’s any plan ever to remove that sort of top-of-book probabilities from the public domain.”
What Do Kalshi’s Institutional Client Numbers Show?
Ross did not provide a breakdown of institutional participation by type, but offered figures on the number and size of the firms using the exchange.
“What I can say is that we have hundreds of clients that are institutional in size that are trading on Kalshi,” he said. “We’ve got many hundreds of clients that have joined the market across all of those groups that you mentioned before.”
The categories raised in the interview included market makers and end users such as hedge funds, asset managers and corporates.
For brokers weighing whether to build or connect, Ross’s pitch ultimately comes back to the same point: exchange infrastructure can be built or bought, but an existing pool of users, pricing and order-book depth is harder to replicate.
