Kalshi Signs Agreement With S&P Dow Jones to Expand Event Contracts

S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI) has struck a partnership with prediction market platform Kalshi to create event contracts tied to S&P DJI benchmarks. The collaboration, announced by S&P Global on Monday, positions Kalshi as a preferred venue for contracts that settle using the official index values published by S&P DJI.

Beyond offering contracts on existing benchmarks, the companies also say they will explore building new indexes that derive signals from Kalshi’s event contract pricing. Those indexes would aim to measure collective market expectations about future outcomes—potentially spanning economic developments, political results and sports events—using contract prices as inputs rather than tracking the performance of traditional financial assets.

Key takeaways

• Kalshi will serve as a preferred platform for event contracts linked to S&P DJI benchmarks, with settlement based on official index values.
• S&P DJI plans to explore new “expectations” indexes that use Kalshi contract prices to reflect market-implied outlooks on various events.
• The firms have not provided a rollout timeline for either the contract offering or the potential new index products.
• The deal reflects a broader trend of established financial market infrastructure moving toward prediction market formats.

Why S&P DJI’s benchmark-linked contracts matter

Prediction markets rely on event-driven instruments where participants express views about specific future outcomes. In this deal, S&P DJI’s role is primarily to anchor those instruments to widely recognized benchmark calculations. According to S&P Global’s announcement, settlement for the proposed contracts will be based on official index values published by S&P DJI—an important detail for traders, issuers and regulators who care about verification and reproducibility.

For market participants, the potential appeal is straightforward: it brings a familiar, benchmark-based framework into a format that typically trades around expectations rather than spot or derivatives exposure to underlying assets. For index providers, it offers a path to extend their data and methodologies into new market structure—where index values can function as the reference point that clears uncertainty.

Still, some practical questions remain unanswered. S&P DJI and Kalshi did not disclose when the contract offering would begin, nor did they provide additional details on how widely the benchmark-linked contracts might expand across index families or jurisdictions.

From benchmarks to “expectations” indexes

The more experimental element of the partnership is the planned exploration of indexes built using Kalshi’s prediction market data. In S&P Global’s description, the envisioned measures would use prices from Kalshi’s event contracts to quantify market expectations about future outcomes. The company’s framing contrasts these gauges with conventional indices that track the performance of traditional financial instruments.

If implemented, this could change how investors and data users approach “forward-looking” measurement. Instead of relying exclusively on surveys, models or realized results after the fact, the indexes would potentially translate crowd-sourced trading signals into a standardized metric—one that could be used in research, hedging discussions, or asset-allocation narratives.

However, the proposal is explicitly exploratory and the announcement did not specify which categories of events would be prioritized, how the indexes would be constructed, or what governance and methodological safeguards would accompany the use of prediction market pricing.

Prediction markets keep drawing interest from incumbents

The S&P DJI–Kalshi collaboration arrives as traditional market operators increasingly explore prediction markets and related derivatives-style products. S&P Global’s announcement references earlier steps by major exchanges and market infrastructure providers, underscoring that this is not an isolated experiment.

In October 2025, Intercontinental Exchange—the parent of the New York Stock Exchange—reportedly committed up to $2 billion to Polymarket, according to Cointelegraph’s coverage. Separately, Nasdaq filed to offer prediction market-style contracts tied to the Nasdaq 100 in March, and later partnered with Kalshi to provide market surveillance technology in August, as described in Cointelegraph reporting and Kalshi’s own announcement regarding the surveillance collaboration.

These moves highlight a growing split between how prediction markets are perceived by the public—often framed as entertainment or speculation—and how major institutions are approaching them: as a mechanism to structure bets around defined events, with settlement tied to observable outcomes and with operational controls provided by established market infrastructure.

S&P Global also closes OpenZeppelin acquisition

Separately from the Kalshi deal, S&P Global announced Monday that it has completed its acquisition of blockchain security firm OpenZeppelin. The purchase was first revealed in September, and financial terms were not disclosed.

OpenZeppelin is known for smart contract security audits and development tooling. S&P Global says OpenZeppelin’s open-source contract libraries underpin more than $38 trillion in value transferred, and that its security team has completed over 900 engagements, according to S&P Global’s statements. The company said OpenZeppelin will continue operating as its own business unit under founder Demian Brener, who will report to Yann Le Pallec, president of S&P Global Ratings.

S&P Global also indicated that it is expanding digital asset risk assessment beyond smart contract security. Earlier this month, S&P Global Ratings launched a framework for evaluating crypto lending vaults across six risk categories, including blockchain security, liquidity and governance, as covered by Cointelegraph. That broader scope suggests the firm is building a wider toolkit for assessing risk across different layers of the crypto ecosystem, not only at the code-audit level.

In practical terms, both initiatives—benchmark-linked prediction contracts and expanded digital asset risk services—point to the same direction: established finance is trying to integrate crypto-adjacent methods (event pricing, on-chain security evaluation, risk frameworks) into more standardized products that can be measured, verified and governed.

Investors and builders watching this space should focus on two near-term uncertainties: whether and how quickly S&P DJI will launch the Kalshi-linked contracts, and what methodology S&P DJI would use if it proceeds with indexes based on prediction market pricing—particularly around governance, event selection and data usage.