Prime brokers Clear Street and Marex to open institutional access to Kalshi prediction markets

Clear Street and Marex Group are moving to provide institutional clients access to Kalshi’s regulated prediction markets, as large hedge funds increase demand for event-driven trading and hedges. Clear Street expects to clear its first Kalshi trade imminently (late March), while Marex plans to roll out client access in the coming months. Kalshi offers binary event contracts that settle at $1 or $0 and price probabilities for outcomes such as Fed rate moves, earnings and macro events. Executives say institutional adoption should accelerate into 2026, supported by prime-broker infrastructure — clearing, custody and compliance — which is seen as the critical enabler of scale. Market participants expect greater liquidity, larger trade sizes and tighter pricing, but warn professional flow could crowd out retail, altering market signals. Regulatory uncertainty remains a key risk: questions include whether some contracts resemble sports betting, potential insider-trading vectors around event-specific contracts, overlapping CFTC/SEC oversight and ongoing state-level lawsuits. Major exchanges have called for clearer rules. For crypto traders, the development matters because institutional flow into regulated prediction markets creates new hedging instruments and continuous event-driven sentiment data that can influence short-term event trades and risk positioning; it also raises counterparty, compliance and liquidity-profile considerations when incorporating prediction-market signals into crypto strategies.