The Federal Reserve meets July 28-29, and all 104 economists polled by Reuters expect a hold at 3.50%-3.75%. Kalshi's July contract puts the probability at 87%, with roughly $29.7 million in volume. But the real action isn't just the rate decision—it's the infrastructure being built around these event contracts.
Volume surge and institutional interest
Combined monthly volume across Kalshi and Polymarket peaked at $13.7 billion in June. July has already exceeded $11 billion. Kalshi's annualized volume more than tripled over six months to $178 billion, while institutional volume climbed 800%. The platform also completed its first customized block trade.
Clear Street, Marex, and Jump Trading are building infrastructure to connect institutions to prediction markets. Clear Street links clients to Kalshi; Marex works with both Kalshi and Polymarket; Jump helps institutions access event markets directly. AQR, Susquehanna, and OKX have advertised specialist prediction-market roles. Corporate treasuries are testing prediction contracts to hedge tariff and regulatory exposure.
Why prop firms see an edge
Louis Régis, founder of on-chain prop firm Propr, argues event contracts enable more rigorous trader selection than conventional markets. Outcomes are bounded and skill is legible. The Foresight Arena benchmark estimates that detecting a real edge of two percentage points requires about 350 resolved binary predictions; a one-point edge requires roughly 1,400.
Funded-trading firms are starting to treat resolved prediction contracts as a way to identify traders—human or algorithmic—who can price uncertainty better than the crowd. Propr currently copies about 5% of its signals onto a live venue (A-booked); the rest remain B-booked until sufficient data is collected to deploy treasury capital responsibly.
Propr's expansion and AI agents
Propr plans to extend its evaluation model to Polymarket, allowing traders and AI agents to qualify for accounts up to $100,000 and hold up to $300,000 across multiple accounts, with an 80% profit share after passing. The article states easy money on Polymarket and Kalshi is disappearing as prop firms deploy AI agents.
That shift is already visible. As more firms build direct access and evaluation frameworks, the days of retail traders scooping up mispriced contracts may be numbered. The question now is how quickly the remaining inefficiencies get arbitraged away.
