Kalshi partners with Alpaca to push event contracts through global brokerage pipes
Kalshi partnered with brokerage infrastructure startup Alpaca on August 31 to expand its CFTC-regulated event contracts through Alpaca's global broker-dealer platform. The integration gives more than 300 financial institutions and 14 million brokerage accounts access to Kalshi's prediction markets via Alpaca's API, letting banks and fintechs offer event-contract trading without building their own compliance and clearing infrastructure.
Alpaca's 14 million accounts and 300-plus institutional clients turn Kalshi from a direct-to-consumer platform into a wholesale prediction-market utility. Banks and wealth platforms can now white-label event-contract trading without filing for their own CFTC designation, collapsing the regulatory barrier that has kept most financial institutions on the sidelines. For Kalshi, the deal diversifies distribution away from its Robinhood API and Cantor's institutional block channel, creating a third revenue leg aimed at global brokerages.
The catch is timing: Alpaca's international expansion still requires local regulatory approvals market by market, so the 14 million headline is a pipeline, not an immediate user base. The first jurisdiction where Alpaca and Kalshi go live together will set the template for how fast other markets follow, and whether competitors like Polymarket or Gemini can match the Apex brokerage distribution that has become the sector's default on-ramp.
The Alpaca distribution deal deepens a brokerage-access arms race that now spans four venues — Kalshi via Apex, Gemini via Apex, OG.com via Trading Technologies, and Cantor via Susquehanna — as platforms compete to lock in the institutional and retail broker-dealer pipes that determine who controls event-contract flow.