At a glance

  • S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI) has named Kalshi one of its preferred prediction market venues, with a licence to list event contracts on its indices, the two companies announced on Monday.
  • New Kalshi contracts will be settled using S&P DJI’s official index levels, and S&P DJI will be a preferred builder of indices based on Kalshi’s market data.
  • No financial terms, launch dates or contract lists were given.

Prediction markets spent the past year fighting to be treated as finance, not gambling. On Monday, the company that runs the S&P 500 and the Dow signed up as a partner.

Put simply, when a Kalshi contract asks where an S&P index will end up, the official S&P DJI number will now decide who is paid.

What the deal covers

The agreement runs in two directions. Kalshi gets a licence to list event contracts on S&P DJI indices as a preferred platform. S&P DJI, in turn, gets to construct indices from Kalshi’s contract data, with economics, politics and sports named as examples.

“Kalshi’s aspiration is to be the next great financial exchange,” Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s co-founder and chief executive, said in the release.

Cathy Clay, chief executive of S&P DJI, called prediction markets “one of the fastest-growing categories in financial markets”.

The release also notes that S&P DJI does not sponsor or endorse Kalshi’s existing contracts linked to the S&P 500 or its other indices.

Wall Street keeps moving in

The deal follows other exchange operators into the sector. ICE, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, agreed in October 2025 to invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket, and Nasdaq partnered with Kalshi in August on market surveillance technology, Cointelegraph reported.

It also lands on the same day the NBA made Kalshi and Polymarket its preferred prediction markets. The legal fight has not gone away: states including Utah argue that event contracts are gambling, and Utah’s lawsuit against Kalshi is still pending.

The crypto angle

Separately, S&P Global said on Monday that it had completed its acquisition of OpenZeppelin, the smart-contract auditing and developer tools firm. OpenZeppelin keeps its name and runs as a separate unit led by Demian Brener, who reports to S&P Global Ratings president Yann Le Pallec. Terms were not disclosed.

So in one day, the index giant tied itself to both a prediction market and a crypto security firm. Prediction markets already reach crypto users through wallets such as Phantom, after Phantom’s Kalshi rollout earlier this month.

What to watch

  • Which S&P DJI indices get Kalshi contracts first, and when.
  • The first index S&P DJI builds from Kalshi data, and its methodology.
  • Whether state regulators challenge index-linked event contracts as they have sports markets.

For how the S&P 500 and bitcoin traded on Monday, see Monday’s US-close Market Read.

Related: Polymarket's surveillance chief on dozens of midterm election probes

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.