Interactive Brokers enters the prediction market! One-stop connection to Kalshi and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—broker clients can place orders with a broker account

Major brokerage firm Interactive Brokers integrates multiple services and launches a new prediction market trading platform. Wall Street has officially moved into event contracts, but it will still face strict regulatory challenges such as insider trading and other similar issues 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, allowing users to participate in prediction market trading directly through their existing brokerage accounts.

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

Kalshi’s valuation soars as Wall Street begins reevaluating prediction markets

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 emerging financial platforms currently drawing the most attention on Wall Street.

Kalshi’s biggest feature 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 the crypto-native prediction market Polymarket, Kalshi is more likely 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 products. Some traders have even begun to view prediction markets as an important tool for monitoring market sentiment, shifts in policy direction, and changes in the broader economy.

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

In the past two years, geopolitical conflicts around the world have intensified, Federal Reserve policy shifts have been frequent, and market volatility has continued to worsen—leading to a rapid increase in investors’ demand for real-time risk pricing.

Compared with traditional analysis reports, which often have a time lag, prediction market prices change in real time with news and market sentiment. 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 place bets through event contracts 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 outcomes.

Meanwhile, the crypto industry has long regarded prediction markets as one of the important blockchain application scenarios. Over the past year, Polymarket saw a surge in popularity due to contracts related to the U.S. presidential election, conflicts in the Middle East, and Federal Reserve policies—prompting more traditional financial institutions to reassess the commercial value of event markets.

Regulation and insider trading controversies continue to heat up

However, as prediction markets expand rapidly, regulatory problems have once again come to the forefront. Recently, cases have emerged in the U.S. in which military personnel used confidential information to profit from Polymarket trading, drawing significant attention from Congress and regulators.

• Related news: U.S. active-duty non-commissioned officer arrested! Alleged insider trading tied to Venezuela operations, reportedly making $400,000 on prediction markets

Some regulators worry that the line between prediction markets and gambling markets is gradually becoming blurred; supporters argue that event markets can improve information efficiency and risk-pricing ability, and may even better reflect the market’s true expectations than traditional polls and research reports.

With large brokerage firms like Interactive Brokers officially entering the space, prediction markets will very likely develop from fringe products into one of the mainstream financial tools on Wall Street in the future.

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