NEXTPredict NYC 2026: The Conference That Hedged Itself on Kalshi

To everyone following Betting the Future:

In July, the organizers of NEXTPredict did something no conference had done before. They bought a hedge on their own event through a prediction market. Twelve thousand dollars of premium, on Kalshi's flight-cancellation market, with Susquehanna as the market maker. If more than half of the flights into JFK are canceled on October 21, the day most attendees travel in, the contracts pay out roughly $3 million, enough to cover the cost of the summit.

I don't know of a better introduction to what this conference is. A media company from the gambling world looked at prediction markets, decided they were a business tool rather than a novelty, and used one to protect its own money. Then it built a conference for everyone else who thinks the same way.

On October 22 and 23, I'll be at Convene at 30 Hudson Yards for NEXTPredict NYC 2026 as a media guest. It is the second of the two prediction market conferences I'm covering in New York this month, and it is a very different room from the first.

What NEXTPredict is

NEXTPredict is the events and media brand launched by the team behind NEXT.io, which has run gambling-industry summits for more than a decade. This is the inaugural edition of what it calls The World's Prediction Markets Summit, and the numbers it is advertising are big: 2,500 attendees, 200 speakers, five stages, two days.

The pitch is explicitly commercial. In the organizers' words, this is the room where the category becomes a business. The audience is broken into six segments: prediction market operators, investors, startup founders, regulators and legal, suppliers, and media. The agenda covers regulation, liquidity, market infrastructure, institutional capital flows, forecasting applications, and the role of media in distributing market signals.

Where PREDICT earlier in the month is built around market structure and who sets the rules, NEXTPredict is built around who sells to whom. Data vendors, payments, compliance, liquidity infrastructure, and the consumer products stacked on top of the exchanges. It is the trade-show layer of an industry that didn't have one twelve months ago.

The timing is not an accident. The summit lands two weeks before the November 3 midterms, which the organizers expect to be the busiest stretch these markets have seen. The room will be full of people whose year is about to be decided.

Why it's worth watching

In every gold rush, the durable companies sold the equipment. NEXTPredict is where you find out who is building the data layer, the liquidity layer, the compliance layer, and the distribution layer that every platform needs. Those are the companies that survive a platform war regardless of who wins it. It is also 2,500 business cards, and a year from now some of those companies will have been acquired by an exchange, a sportsbook, or a bank. And the organizers proved that a real company can offload a real risk on a regulated event contract. Somebody in the room is planning the second one.

I'll be listening for all of it. But as at PREDICT, I'm not going to summarize panels. I'm going to collect predictions.

The predictions I want to hear

Same rule as always: say it clearly enough that a market can settle it. I'll be asking the same questions I asked at PREDICT two weeks earlier, to a different room, on purpose. Same questions, sixteen days apart, one scoreboard. If the answers move between Times Square and Hudson Yards, that tells us something too.

Every question has a live contract behind it. Anyone who answers can put money on it the same day. Prices are where the markets stood on September 6.

1. Who wins the midterms?

By October 22, Election Day is twelve days out and this will be the most-traded question in the building. As of early September, Kalshi and Polymarket both have the House at roughly 85 percent Democratic, and they disagree on the Senate: Kalshi has Republicans at 52 percent to hold it, Polymarket has Democrats at 51 percent to take it. I want to know where the operators and traders in this room are, and whether they'd take the other side.

2. Which AI company has the best model at the end of 2026?

Kalshi's year-end market has Claude at 62 percent, ChatGPT at 25, Gemini at 6, and Grok at 5. Ten weeks to resolution. Founders and investors in this room are betting their companies on some version of this answer. I want to hear them say it out loud.

3. Which platform is the biggest prediction market at the end of 2027?

Kalshi, Polymarket, or someone else. At a conference built around the business of prediction markets, this is the question. There's no contract on it yet, so I'll define it myself: largest monthly notional volume in December 2027, per an independent tracker like the NEXT.io dashboard. Every answer gets logged with a name and a date. If a venue lists this market before the year is out, I'll link it here.

4. Your best call, and your worst.

The one I'm most looking forward to. I'll ask everyone for their favorite prediction market they got right, and the one they got hugely wrong. Not the position, the story: what they saw, what they missed, what it cost. This room has operators who have watched millions of trades settle and traders who have been on the wrong side of a few. I've published my own zero-for-five. I want to hear theirs.

When these questions settle, the scoreboard goes public. That is the show.

Who should attend

If you're building a business in prediction markets, this is the room. Founders, operators, suppliers, data and technology vendors, investors looking at the infrastructure rather than the trade, and the regulators and lawyers who will have to bless all of it. Traders will find plenty here too, but the summit is designed around deals and partnerships rather than trading strategy.

NEXTPredict is also reviewing applications for three special passes, which is genuinely useful if you fit one of them:

• Market Maker and Trader Pass (complimentary): for active market makers and traders. They ask who you trade for, which venues, and your volume.
• Startup Pass (discounted): for early-stage founders. They ask what you're building and want a deck.
• Media Pass (complimentary): for journalists and creators covering prediction markets and the midterms.

Meet Betting the Future at NEXTPredict

I'll be at Hudson Yards both days recording. If you're a founder, investor, operator, trader, or regulator willing to make a prediction on the record, on a question with a live market behind it, find me. Some of these conversations will become episodes. Four days after the summit I'm recording an episode on the 2028 Democratic nominee, so the midterm answers I collect here will be graded fast.

Send me a DM on X or LinkedIn and we'll find a time at Convene.

I will see you in the future. Or at Hudson Yards, two weeks before the midterms.

Betting the Future is attending NEXTPredict as an independent media guest. This is not a paid placement. Market prices are as of September 6, 2026. Not financial advice. Prediction market contracts involve risk of total loss.