Kalshi turns to Alpaca for global distribution

Kalshi has struck a partnership with Alpaca that will let people using Alpaca-powered brokerage platforms trade Kalshi event contracts without leaving the platform, opening a path to an international audience, according to Quartz and CNBC. The companies said the rollout in new markets will still depend on local regulatory approval.

The scale of Alpaca makes the tie-up notable. Kalshi said Alpaca reaches 14 million brokerage accounts through more than 300 financial institutions worldwide, and Alpaca’s API has about 83,000 monthly users. Alpaca completed registration with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission earlier this month as a U.S.-licensed futures commission merchant.

Max Crowley, Kalshi’s vice president of business development, said the partnership would let brokerages in other countries build on Alpaca’s technology, making it faster to bring Kalshi’s markets online once regulators approve them. He said the global build-out would take time, but that the technical partnership enables it.

Alpaca’s chief brokerage officer, Tony Lee, said the firm moved into prediction markets because it saw customer demand for access to event contracts. Yoshi Yokokawa, Alpaca’s co-founder and chief executive, said international growth would be gradual, but argued that the pool of new traders could become meaningful for event contracts as an asset class.

The deal is Kalshi’s latest expansion move. In June, it partnered with Canadian financial firm Wealthsimple to bring its markets to Canada, and it has also filed with the CFTC to launch perpetual futures tied to U.S. equity indexes and copper.

Kalshi has also been growing fast by other measures. Quartz reported in May that it raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation, and that its annualized trading volume had climbed from $52 billion to $178 billion over the previous six months.

The broader regulatory backdrop remains active. In June, the CFTC proposed amendments to its rules on event-contract derivatives, and its Federal Register notice said 2025 trading volume across CFTC-registered prediction markets exceeded $25 billion.