Polymarket Challenges Traditional Futures With AI-Focused Institutional Block Trade

Polymarket has closed its first on-chain institutional block trade tied to artificial intelligence compute infrastructure, saying this shows prediction markets can function like commodity futures for the AI era.

The transaction was a six-figure block trade between digital asset prime brokerage FalconX and AneraLabs, a company that is building a clearinghouse for AI risk, Polymarket said in a Tuesday (June 2) press release.

The transaction settled against Ornn AI’s Ornn Compute Price Index, which is a transaction-based benchmark that tracks Nvidia H100 GPU compute rental pricing, and settlement was recorded on the Polygon blockchain, according to the release.

“Prediction markets are emerging as one of the most powerful venues for institutional block trades, and this transaction is proof,” Brooke Rizzetto, head of institutional liquidity at Polymarket, said in the release. “Seeing an institutional counterparty use Polymarket to hedge real GPU compute exposure at scale is exactly the future we have been building toward.”

Ravi Doshi, global co-head of markets at FalconX, said in the release that the transaction delivers “deeper liquidity and clearer price discovery to this crucial, rapidly evolving commodity market.”

Vishwa Naik, co-founder and CEO of Aneralabs, said in the release that “this trade represents the first major application of embedding prediction markets as a risk transfer tool for an entirely new asset class.”

Another prediction market, Kalshi, facilitated an institutional block trade in April. That involved a transaction executed by introducing broker Greenlight Commodities between a Houston-based environmental hedge fund and institutional liquidity provider Jump Trading Group.

Greenlight Commodities said at the time in a press release that the transaction showed that institutional block orders can be facilitated through the regulatory framework used across traditional wholesale commodities markets, including National Futures Association (NFA) registration, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) market oversight, and execution through designated contract markets (DCMs) and derivatives clearing organizations (DCOs), like Kalshi and other regulated exchanges.

Kalshi Vice President of Business Development Max Crowley told Bloomberg in April that the transaction is “a step forward as far as us having institutional functionality and support to be able to do these types of transactions.”