NEXTPredict, the organizer of a prediction-markets conference in New York, has paid $12,000 for contracts designed to protect its roughly $3 million investment if severe flight disruption prevents delegates from reaching the event. The contracts, purchased through Kalshi, pay out if more than half of flights scheduled to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport are canceled on October 21, the day before the conference begins.
The arrangement places a conventional business risk inside a prediction market. Susquehanna acted as the market maker on the trade, taking the other side, in what the parties describe as the first time a conference has been hedged through this type of market.
How the hedge works
NEXTPredict’s summit is scheduled for October 22 and 23 at Convene in Hudson Yards. The $3 million figure represents the organizer’s full investment in the event, according to the report by Decrypt. The contracts are intended to return approximately that amount if the specified cancellation threshold is reached, while the $12,000 payment is the premium paid for the protection.
The trigger is not whether the conference itself is canceled. Instead, the contracts settle according to a measurable airport outcome: whether more than 50% of flights due to arrive at JFK on October 21 are canceled. The date was selected as the main travel day before the summit.
Pierre Lindh, co-founder and managing director of NEXT.io, said the airport measure was chosen as a proxy for a major event in the outside world. If half of JFK’s scheduled arrivals were canceled, he said, it would indicate that something significant had happened, potentially leaving large numbers of delegates unable to travel.
Kalshi built the market after NEXT.io approached it as an institutional customer. The company self-certified the flight-cancellation contracts with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on July 14. Retail traders cannot access this particular market. The contract rules also exclude certain causes of disruption, including drone incidents and bomb threats.
Why event organizers see an insurance gap
Lindh said the company’s concern comes from repeated exposure to events that can disrupt travel without formally forcing a conference to close. Over 13 years and about 800 events, he said, the company has faced risks including a New York blizzard, escalating conflict in the Middle East and concerns about fuel supplies at European airports.
He also referred to a conference announced in 2020 that never took place after the world went into lockdown. The company lost all of its revenue for that year, according to his account.
Traditional event insurance may cover incidents at the venue, such as fires, rigging failures or injuries. Force majeure coverage generally applies when an event is canceled. But a major airport disruption might leave an event technically open while causing extensive financial damage: organizers may have already spent the money, while speakers and delegates cannot attend and revenue is lost.
Lindh described this as a gap in which a conference can proceed but still suffer the consequences of a crisis. He also criticized the time and uncertainty involved in arranging and claiming against insurance. Under the Kalshi structure, the parties instead rely on the contract’s stated condition and the platform’s determination of whether it has been met.
A new use for prediction markets
Prediction markets are commonly associated with contracts tied to future outcomes. In this case, the instrument is being used by a company with a specific financial exposure rather than by a participant simply seeking to forecast an event.
The deal attracted criticism because, in theory, a participant could benefit from a flight disruption. Lindh said that concern was fair, but argued that NEXTPredict’s position represents the opposite side of that risk: a business buying protection for an exposure it already has, on a regulated venue, with an institutional market maker providing the other side.
Kalshi chief executive Tarek Mansour said the transaction showed prediction markets moving beyond forecasting and becoming practical business infrastructure. Joe Grubb, who leads prediction-markets business development at Susquehanna, said the structure could enable the transfer of institutional risks that previously had no clear route to market.
For NEXTPredict, the trade is an attempt to turn a long-standing uncertainty into a defined financial cost. The company has paid $12,000 for coverage of roughly $3 million, with the outcome tied to a publicly observable airport statistic rather than a potentially disputed insurance claim.
Moneyiar market picture
Moneyiar data at 09:59 on October 13, 2026, showed mixed performance among the listed assets:
- Ethereum Name Service (ENS): $5.9747675903, down 5% over 24 hours and 13.15% over seven days.
- edgeX (EDGE): $0.3348013316, down 6.96% over 24 hours and 26.06% over seven days.
- Nexus (NEX): $0.0000007904, down 3.03% over 24 hours and 2.91% over seven days.
Moneyiar data for Light (LIGHT), recorded at 02:53 on September 14, 2026, showed a price of $0.1672899542, up 1.73% over 24 hours but down 9.4% over seven days.
