Cantor Fitzgerald Opens Kalshi's Event Contracts to 3,000 Institutional Clients — Wall Street's First Block Trading Service for Prediction Markets
Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. has launched institutional block trading in event contracts on Kalshi, becoming the first full-service investment bank to bring institutional clients into prediction markets at scale. Cantor will act as introducing broker for roughly 3,000 institutional clients, with Susquehanna Predictions providing liquidity. Contracts include weather outcomes, commodity prices, corporate earnings, iPhone sales, and AI supply chain risks. Bernstein analysts estimate prediction market annual trading volumes could reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade. CNBC reports hedge funds are preparing to enter in a significant way.
Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., one of the largest and oldest US investment banking and brokerage firms, has launched an institutional block trading service for event contracts on Kalshi, making it the first full-service investment bank to provide institutional clients with formal access to prediction market contracts at scale. Cantor will act as an introducing broker — arranging and facilitating the execution of institutional-size block trades in event contracts — for roughly 3,000 institutional clients, enabling them to negotiate trades at a single price away from Kalshi's central order book. Susquehanna Predictions, part of the Susquehanna International Group of Companies and one of the largest liquidity providers in prediction markets, is providing institutional-scale pricing and liquidity for the service. Initial contract categories include weather outcomes, commodity prices, corporate earnings releases, iPhone sales figures, and AI supply chain risks.
The Cantor announcement is significant because of what it signals about institutional legitimacy. Cantor Fitzgerald has operated in fixed income, equities, and capital markets since 1945 and its client base is institutional — hedge funds, asset managers, pension funds, family offices, sovereign wealth funds. These are exactly the clients that DraftKings CEO Jason Robins described when he said prediction markets attract an '80-90% institutional' customer base on his Q2 earnings call. What was previously informal — hedge funds and proprietary trading firms trading prediction market contracts through retail interfaces or direct API access — is now formalized through a named introducing broker with an established institutional relationships infrastructure. CNBC reported on August 19 that hedge funds are preparing to enter prediction markets in a significant way, citing the Cantor launch as a catalyst. Bernstein analysts have estimated prediction market annual trading volumes could reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade, contingent on institutional participation at scale.
The contract types in Cantor's initial offering are notably distinct from the sports and political contracts that have driven the state-litigation wave. Weather, commodity prices, earnings releases, iPhone sales, and AI supply chain risks are all financial or economic data-referenced contracts — the categories that the Washington state injunction explicitly exempted from its ban, and that fall most clearly within CFTC's historical mandate over derivatives. Institutional capital flowing into prediction markets through the data-referenced contract categories — rather than sports and elections — may accelerate the regulatory bifurcation that several courts have already gestured at: a CFTC-regulated institutional market for economic event contracts alongside a state-contested consumer market for sports and political contracts. Cantor's block trading service, which requires institutional account status, is not accessible to the 18-year-old retail customers that Baltimore's lawsuit is concerned about.
Susquehanna International Group's role as liquidity provider connects the Cantor launch to the existing institutional infrastructure in prediction markets. SIG's Susquehanna Predictions has been one of the largest market makers on Kalshi and Polymarket for over a year, and SIG is also the institutional partner in Robinhood's Rothera exchange joint venture — which reported $156 million in event contracts revenue in its first partial quarter of operation. Cantor as introducing broker plus SIG as market maker replicates the exact intermediation structure that exists in institutional equities and options markets, applied to event contracts. The Bernstein $1 trillion volume estimate, if realized, would place prediction markets in the same rough size bracket as the US options market by the end of the decade — a comparison that implies institutional, not retail, dominance of the category.
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