Prediction market operator Kalshi has agreed to work with brokerage and financial infrastructure company Alpaca to distribute its event contracts to international users, pending approval from local regulators in each market.
Under the arrangement, individuals and businesses that rely on Alpaca’s brokerage infrastructure will gain access to Kalshi’s event contracts through the same technology Alpaca already uses to support trading in other asset classes.
The partnership follows Alpaca’s registration with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) earlier this month, when the company became a US-licensed futures commission merchant, a type of brokerage authorized to handle orders for derivatives contracts.
Demand from users drove the move
Alpaca’s decision to enter prediction markets stemmed from demand expressed by its existing user base, according to Tony Lee, the company’s Chief Brokerage Officer.
“Our mission is really to open up financial services to as many people around the world as possible, and you really have to go where the customer demand is,” Lee told CNBC.
For Kalshi, the appeal of the partnership lies in its potential to accelerate international expansion, according to Max Crowley, the company’s Vice President of Business Development.
Alpaca maintains partnerships with more than 300 financial institutions and serves 14 million brokerage accounts worldwide. Crowley said that brokerages in other countries will be able to build on Alpaca’s technology, which he expects will speed up the process of bringing Kalshi’s event contracts online in new markets once regulators grant approval.
“They’re a trusted brand, they’re technology forward, their customers love working with them,” Crowley said. “It’s going to take us a lot of time to build the business globally, but this technical partnership enables that.”
Second international deal for Kalshi in 2026
The Alpaca partnership represents Kalshi’s second publicized step toward international operations this year. In June, the company partnered with Canadian financial firm Wealthsimple to introduce its markets in Canada.
Alpaca separately counts 83,000 monthly users of its Application Programming Interface (API), a tool that lets individual developers build custom software for trading assets. Some individual prediction market traders have built personalized, automated software in an effort to gain an advantage over other participants.
Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Alpaca, said scaling Kalshi’s event contracts internationally will take time. He said the pool of new traders the partnership could eventually attract represents a substantial opportunity for the event contracts category.
“As that scales,” Yokokawa said, “I think it should be pretty meaningful for event contracts as an asset class in general.”