Interactive Brokers enters the prediction market! One-stop connection to Kalshi and CME, allowing brokerage clients to place orders

Major brokerage Interactive Brokers integrates multiple services and launches a brand-new prediction market trading platform. Wall Street has officially moved into event contract territory, but will still face strict regulatory challenges such as insider trading in the future.

Interactive Brokers officially enters the prediction market, integrating Kalshi and CME services

Global major electronic brokerage Interactive Brokers (Interactive Brokers) announced the launch of a new prediction market trading platform, integrating event-based trading products such as Kalshi, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and ForecastEx into a single interface—so users can participate in prediction market trading directly through their existing brokerage accounts.

According to official information, the platform in the future will offer a range of event contracts covering interest rate decisions, inflation data, election results, energy markets, and major global events. Users will also be able to trade stocks, futures, options, cryptocurrencies, and prediction market commodities within the same system.

Kalshi valuation soars, as Wall Street begins reevaluating prediction markets

The prediction market platform Kalshi has risen rapidly over the past year. Earlier this year, it completed a $1 billion funding round, reaching a valuation of $22 billion, making it one of the most closely watched emerging financial platforms on Wall Street in recent times.

Kalshi’s biggest standout is that it is regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), enabling it to legally offer event contract trading services to U.S. users. Compared with crypto-native prediction markets like Polymarket, Kalshi is more able to attract traditional financial institutions and large pools of capital.

With Interactive Brokers directly integrating Kalshi and CME, it also shows that Wall Street is starting to treat event-based trading as a new category of financial product. Some traders have even begun to view prediction markets as an important tool for tracking market sentiment, policy direction, and broader economic changes.

Prediction markets are gradually becoming an entry point for financial information and trading decisions

Over the past two years, geopolitical conflicts around the world have intensified, Federal Reserve policies have swung back and forth, and market volatility has continued to worsen—driving investors’ demand for real-time risk pricing to grow quickly.

Compared with traditional analysis reports that often have a time lag, prediction market prices change in real time as news and market sentiment shift. As a result, more and more funds and trading institutions are starting to see prediction markets as an auxiliary decision-making tool. Investors can now directly use event contracts to bet on whether the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates, whether the U.S. CPI will be higher than expected, and even on international conflicts and election results.

Meanwhile, the crypto industry has long viewed prediction markets as one of the key application scenarios for blockchain. Over the past year, Polymarket has surged in popularity due to contracts related to the U.S. presidential election, conflicts in the Middle East, and Federal Reserve policy—leading more traditional financial institutions to reassess the business value of event markets.

Regulation and insider-trading controversies continue to heat up

However, as prediction markets expand rapidly, regulatory issues are once again coming to the forefront. In the U.S. recently, there have been cases in which military personnel reportedly used confidential information to profit from Polymarket trading, drawing significant attention from Congress and regulatory authorities.

• Related news: U.S. active-duty officer arrested! Allegedly involved in insider trading tied to Venezuela operations, profiting 400k in “鎂” from prediction markets

Some regulators worry that the line between prediction markets and gambling markets is becoming increasingly blurred; supporters argue that event markets can improve information efficiency and risk-pricing capability, and may even reflect market expectations more accurately than traditional polls and research reports.

With major brokerages such as Interactive Brokers officially moving into the space, prediction markets will very likely evolve from fringe products into one of Wall Street’s mainstream financial tools in the future.

This article is compiled by Crypto Agent from information gathered from various sources, reviewed and edited by 《Crypto City》. It is currently still in the training stage and may contain logical bias or informational errors; the content is for reference only. Please do not treat it as investment advice.