EDGE Markets Debuts Real-Time Payments for Prediction Markets

Gambling/prediction market-focused banking platform EDGE Markets has raised $29.2 million in new funding.

CEO Seni Thomas shared the news of the company’s Series A round in an interview with CNBC Monday (June 8), while also announcing a new real-time payments system.

“We have 24-hour markets … and you can’t get money in at the same velocity,” Thomas said. “Any one of our users can sign into our consumer bank accounts and actually push out up to $10 million per day, and it hits your Kalshi account within two minutes.”

Users can access this system — known as EDGE Connect — through EDGE Boost, a financial platform that only permits deposits for spending on gambling and prediction markets. Thomas said EDGE Connect is now available on Kalshi, and that the company is working to implement the technology on five other platforms in the months ahead.

The company is also launching the EDGE Pro platform, designed to act as a hub for institutional market makers to move money between various prediction markets overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the report added.

Thomas told CNBC Pro addresses a unique problem facing institutional traders in the prediction market space.

“You’re going to now have 10 different liquidity pools, actually offering very similar contracts,” he said. “You need to have a very, very fast infrastructure to be able to kind of move all that in real time.”

According to the report, EDGE Markets was founded in 2020 by Thomas, with the company launching EDGE Boost last March. That platform has since processed more than $2 billion in transactions, CNBC added.

The launch of the company’s new real-time payment product comes as consumers continue to embrace instant payouts, as research from PYMNTS Intelligence has found.

That data shows that 74% of consumers said they had received at least one payout instantly in November, the highest level recorded since PYMNTS began tracking this figure six years ago.

This “suggests that instant disbursements are becoming normalized across everyday financial activity rather than remaining concentrated in limited use cases,” PYMNTS wrote last week.

Meanwhile, 70% of consumers receiving core cash flow who need funds right away make instant payments their preferred option after using them once, while 72% of consumers receiving their core income via instant payments tend to pay a fee for immediacy.

“The finding suggests consumers attach measurable value to timing when access to funds helps avoid disruptions or maintain financial stability,” the report added. “At the same time, the report notes that willingness to pay remains situational and rises most sharply when needs are urgent.”