Key Takeaways
- Kalshi’s Andy Ross says users most often request a “will my partner divorce me” market.
- Ross joined Kalshi in March after 16 years at Morgan Stanley and Standard Chartered.
- Kalshi’s institutional volume hit $178 billion (annualized) recently after an 800% six-month surge.
The Market Nobody Expected to Top the Request List
Kalshi built a tool inside its app that lets users pitch markets they want to see listed. Ask Andy Ross, the platform’s Head of Institutional, what tops that request list, and the answer isn’t the Federal Reserve, the midterms, or the next big sports championship, but something totally out of left field. Ross revealed:
“Our number one market that we’re asked by individuals to develop is, will my partner divorce me.”
It’s a funny anecdote, but it’s also a genuinely useful data point about where prediction markets are headed. Kalshi has spent the past year building out politically and economically weighty markets (Federal Reserve decisions, election odds, macro data prints) while its actual user base keeps gravitating toward markets about their own lives.
That tension between what a platform builds for headlines and what people actually want to trade on is one of the more interesting undercurrents in the entire prediction-market boom.
A Wall Street Veteran’s Pitch for Betting on Everything
Ross isn’t a lifelong prediction-market believer who stumbled into the industry but rather a Wall Street veteran who jumped ship for it. He joined Kalshi in March of this year as an executive after a stretch as global head of prime brokerage at Standard Chartered, and before that ran Curve Global, an interest-rate derivatives platform backed by the London Stock Exchange Group, following 16 years in over-the-counter clearing at Morgan Stanley. In a recent interview, he opined:
“I believe prediction markets are the single most important disruptive force in financial markets since the development of the eurodollar future.”
His broader pitch to institutions rests on a simple idea, i.e. prediction markets function like commodity exchanges, not sportsbooks. “The exchange works exactly like a commodity exchange, where buyers face the sellers. You don’t face a book that is generating a price against you,” Ross said, posturing Kalshi’s order-book model as fundamentally different from a Vegas sportsbook setting its own odds against customers.
Such a thought process has clearly resonated with the institutions Kalshi is chasing given that the platform’s institutional trading volume grew roughly 800% over a recent six-month stretch in 2026, pushing annualized volume to $178 billion.
The Fed Angle Nobody’s Betting Against
Ross’s most consequential comments, though, may be about the Federal Reserve. Since Kevin Warsh replaced Jerome Powell as Fed chair earlier this year, Warsh has largely ditched the detailed forward guidance markets used to lean on, leaving traders to fill in the blanks themselves. He noted:
“Perhaps as Mr. Warsh is going to do less forward guidance, the Kalshi data coming in… is a great way of having a vision of the value of the commons,”
Ross further argued that prediction-market pricing is stepping into a role the Fed itself used to fill more explicitly. Bitcoin.com News has tracked how seriously traders are taking that shift, with Kalshi and Polymarket bettors piling tens of millions of dollars onto Fed rate-decision markets even as Citadel Securities and prediction markets have openly disagreed on where policy is headed next.
