New contracts follow Wall Street interest in corporate KPIs, tracking credit card spend, point-of-sale data, foot traffic, and app downloads at the industry level, with data provided by Carbon Arc.

Kalshi, the next-generation derivatives exchange, launched sector KPI prediction markets, a new class of event contracts that track corporate performance metrics across entire industries, including credit card spend, point-of-sale data, foot traffic, and app downloads. The contracts resolve to data from Carbon Arc, the neutral data layer for the AI economy.

Kalshi already lists contracts on KPIs for individual companies, such as app downloads for a single AI product. The new contracts track those metrics at the sector level. Instead of taking a position on downloads for one AI app, traders can now take a position on downloads across the AI category as a whole.

“Atomizing equities into specific events and KPIs is one of Kalshi’s best use cases,” said Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi. “Expanding to the sector level is the next logical step.”

The launch extends a shift prediction markets have already set in motion. Event contracts atomize individual stocks into their underlying drivers. Sector KPIs do the same for the ETF. Rather than buying a fund that bundles fundamentals, sentiment, and macro exposure into one instrument, market participants can isolate the specific industry metric they have a view on.

“The data that drives businesses has always been valuable, but historically it’s been hard to get, fragmented, and difficult to use,” said Kirk McKeown, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Arc.

“We built Carbon Arc to be the pipes, plumbing, permissions and payment structure for the world’s private data, with compliance built in from the start. Kalshi’s decision to reference our data reflects growing demand for data that is structured,
permissioned and properly governed.”

That precision opens hedging use cases that have not existed before. For example, a retailer exposed to a slowdown in consumer spending, a restaurant operator watching foot traffic, or a developer whose revenue depends on adoption across an app category can offset that risk with a contract tied directly to the metric that drives their business. Investors can manage sector exposure with more precision than a stock or ETF allows.

The indices also create a new source of information. Prices on Kalshi are set on an open, public order book by people putting their own money behind their views and trading against one another, the same way prices form on any financial exchange. Every trade is public and every price move is visible. When participants with different information compete in one market, the price becomes a crowdsourced, continuously updated forecast of where an industry is heading.

Contracts settle against Prisms data from Carbon Arc, whose data infrastructure platform connects entities across different data assets into one unified ontology. Sector KPI contracts are available now on Kalshi’s website and mobile app.

Source: Kalshi