Cantor Fitzgerald offers Wall Street access to Kalshi’s prediction markets

Cantor Fitzgerald is opening the doors between Wall Street’s biggest players and Kalshi’s prediction markets, giving roughly 3,000 institutional clients the ability to place large bets on everything from weather events to economic indicators. The move marks one of the clearest signals yet that event contracts are graduating from retail curiosity to institutional asset class.

The brokerage will serve as an Introducing Broker, enabling privately negotiated trades in event contracts that bypass Kalshi’s central order book. Susquehanna Predictions is stepping in as the liquidity and pricing backbone, solving the chicken-and-egg problem that has kept big money on the sidelines: institutions wouldn’t trade because there wasn’t enough liquidity, and there wasn’t enough liquidity because institutions wouldn’t trade.

How the plumbing works

Kalshi operates as a Designated Contract Market regulated by the CFTC, the same federal agency that oversees futures and options on commodities. Its core product is simple: yes/no contracts on real-world outcomes. Will the Fed cut rates at the next meeting? Will a hurricane make landfall in Florida this season? Will Company X beat earnings estimates? Each question becomes a tradable contract priced between zero and one dollar.

Cantor co-CEO Pascal Bandelier framed the problem plainly: institutional engagement in prediction markets has lagged because regulated exchanges haven’t offered the scale these players require. The partnership with Kalshi is designed to close that gap.

One particularly notable feature of the Cantor arrangement: institutional clients can request custom markets. If a hedge fund wants a contract on a specific event that doesn’t yet exist on Kalshi’s platform, it can submit the idea, and Kalshi can seek CFTC approval to list it, provided it meets specific liquidity requirements.

The competitive landscape shifts

The move also intensifies competition in the prediction market space. Polymarket, which operates offshore and caters primarily to crypto-native users, has dominated in volume and public mindshare. But Polymarket’s unregulated status makes it inaccessible to US institutions bound by compliance frameworks. Kalshi’s CFTC-regulated structure, now paired with Cantor’s distribution network, creates a compliant alternative that institutions can actually use.

For Kalshi specifically, this partnership addresses the platform’s biggest weakness. Despite its regulatory advantage, Kalshi has historically struggled with thinner liquidity compared to offshore competitors. Bringing in Susquehanna as a dedicated market maker and Cantor as a distribution channel could meaningfully change those dynamics.

The initial focus is on Kalshi, but Cantor has signaled that partnerships with other trading venues could follow.

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