PredTrade is a prediction-market research codebase with an arbitrage engine specified but not built. The research core is shipped: a backtest harness that reproduces fills, position math across venue categories, and calibration from outcomes. One read-only Kalshi adapter is live, the venue-adapter contract is defined, and the execution layer is specified and costed — that is the part a trading shop otherwise spends twelve to eighteen months getting wrong before it gets right. It shares no code with Project0 Core, and its append-only ledger is a design, not an implementation. The buyer owns the desk decisions and the capital. PredTrade is the architecture, the research core, and the backtest provenance underneath.
Same team. Governed. More capable.
PredTrade augments a Day-1 Founder or a buyer entity that wants to operate a multi-venue arbitrage product as a going concern. It does not replace your prime brokerage relationships, your KYC and AML posture at each venue, your regulatory filings, or your trading judgment. Operators still choose what trades clear. Risk officers still own the exposure caps. Tax and accounting still belong to your entity. What changes is the engineering distance to a working product.
What PredTrade replaces in practice is the build calendar. The traditional answer to "I want to run multi-venue prediction-market and perp arbitrage" is hire two senior trading engineers, write a venue adapter library for each venue you trade, build a calibration loop from scratch, write a rules engine, design an append-only ledger schema, engineer a backtest harness, and ship after twelve to eighteen months of work. The alternative answer is acquire PredTrade as a Day-1 Founder and start from a working research core — roughly thirteen engineer-days stand between this codebase and a first sandbox paper trade, on your calendar rather than a promised quarter.
What you should expect today: a research-grade backtest harness — 24 implementation modules covering fill simulation, venue-category-aware position math, deterministic replay and GO/NO-GO verdict gates — a venue-adapter contract that normalizes prediction markets, event contracts, DFS, and crypto perps into one interface, one read-only Kalshi adapter, and standalone Firestore schemas with a specified governance design. PredTrade has no Core dependency today, so nothing is gating live execution. What you should not expect: venue adapters connected to live order books today, a turnkey desk that trades without operator judgment, a guarantee that all venues remain legally accessible from every jurisdiction, or a regulatory blessing for any specific strategy. The adapter and execution layers are specified, costed, and next on the build. The architecture is a tool. The buyer owns the trading and the compliance posture.
The regulatory landscape for event contracts shifted in 2024. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has steadily expanded the perimeter for federally regulated event-contract listings at Designated Contract Markets. The Kalshi Inc. v. CFTC decision in October 2024 (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Case No. 23-cv-3257) permitted federally regulated election-event contract listings, which followed earlier expansions for economic-event contracts. Event contracts are no longer an unregulated novelty. They are a federally supervised category with growing volume and a real cost-of-error from operating outside the rules.
Crypto perpetual swaps have continued to deepen in liquidity across decentralized venues. Funding-rate arbitrage between long spot and short perp (or the inverse) is a documented strategy with persistent edge, but it requires venue-specific orderbook integration, FX-aware position accounting, and a rules engine that respects venue health and exposure caps — all three are build requirements here, not shipped components. Building that from scratch is engineering work that scales with venue count.
The third force is the cost of building a regulated trading stack in 2026. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a national median annual wage of $99,010 for Financial and Investment Analysts (SOC 13-2051, May 2024). Senior trading-engineer compensation at proprietary trading shops typically runs above the BLS median. Two senior engineers plus a compliance officer plus a quant developer plus benefits and recruiter fees clears one and a half to two and a half million dollars over an eighteen-month build before the system has cleared its first trade.
Hiring another senior trading engineer is not the cheapest path to a multi-venue arbitrage engine. Acquisition is. PredTrade is the alternative when you want a validated backtest and calibration core, a venue-adapter contract that already spans four venue categories, and and reproducible backtest provenance — without spending the first year discovering what the architecture needed to be.
Primary sources. Kalshi Inc. v. CFTC, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Case No. 23-cv-3257, decided September-October 2024. U.S. CFTC Designated Contract Markets registry: cftc.gov/IndustryOversight/TradingOrganizations/DCMs. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2024, Financial and Investment Analysts (SOC 13-2051): bls.gov/oes/current/oes132051.htm.
Specific capacity numbers depend on your venue count, your strategy mix, your jurisdiction, and your existing compliance posture. The magnitude is what we model together once we see your target venue list and your jurisdiction map. Directionally, a buyer should see relief first on venue-adapter coverage, then on calibration-driven opportunity ranking, then on reproducible backtest provenance.
Illustrative only. Uses U.S. compensation benchmarks for trading-engineering roles and standard hiring friction assumptions. Your geography, equity compensation, and existing team will move these bands.
Salary anchors. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2024. Financial and Investment Analysts (SOC 13-2051): bls.gov/oes/current/oes132051.htm. National median annual wage $99,010. Senior trading-engineer compensation at proprietary trading shops typically runs above the BLS median; the band above reflects 1.5 to 2.5 times the median to capture prop-shop pay realities.
The cost of acquisition is a fraction of the cost of building when the bottleneck is engineering time, not venue access or trading capital. The exact delta depends on your existing engineering bench, your jurisdiction, your venue priority list, and your target time-to-market. We want to model this with your real inputs, not a generic prop-shop calculator.
This is not headcount reduction. It is a working research core that lets the team you have spend more of the week on capital allocation, strategy research, and regulatory posture, and less on venue-adapter glue code.
You ramp on your own jurisdiction calendar.
Your data does not train any model
Project0 does not use your trading positions, market data, predictions, P&L records, or any operational data to train, fine-tune, or improve any model. This is contractual.
Your data stays in your control
Firestore schemas and infrastructure config transfer to your buyer-entity hosting; the position store, fill records and trade ledger are not built yet. You hold admin access. Venue credentials live in your environment under your entity's KYC, never shared.
Deletion is real
Operational deletes follow your retention policy. The cold-archive writer is append-only, and the trade decision ledger it would pair with is documented rather than built; append-only semantics mean historic decisions are tamper-evident by design, which is different from silent erase. Regulator-mandated retention is handled by the buyer entity.
Sub-processor transparency
Sub-processor list (cloud hosting, LLM provider for event matching, observability, offsite archive) is documented and extended under your entity at acquisition.
Access your systems without authorization
No access to venue credentials, position data, or trading state without your administered identity and your access scopes. Pattern reuse from Project0 is concentrated in a thin server client and the audit ledger primitives, not in your operating data.
Make decisions without human approval
Default patterns in the shipped architecture emphasize human-led or human-in-the-loop authority for every live trade. Agent-autonomous mode is a design position, not a running mode: the read-only interlock blocks every order placement today, and the rules engine that would gate live execution is not implemented.
Hold operating keys after transition
We do not hold operating keys after transition. During the transition window, key handoff is documented per the runbook. Post-transition the buyer entity owns all venue credentials, all cloud-hosting credentials, and all KMS material.
Compete with your business
We sell governed multi-venue trading infrastructure to a Day-1 Founder or buyer entity. We do not raise our own fund on your signals, run a competing book on the venues we hand you, or take fees on your trades.
Expect a 30 to 60 day diligence and transition window, for diligence on the read-only adapter and backtest harness, with operator onboarding complete. A full engagement typically runs about eighteen months under a Founding Partner agreement so we can sequence venue adapter handoff, calibration-data continuity, jurisdiction work, and any custom strategy connectors with your roadmap. Founding Partner pricing is conversation-led because venue scope, jurisdiction, existing engineering bench, and strategy mix swing cost more than seat count does.
Integration load on your side is jurisdiction-first and KYC-first: plan for focused legal and compliance time during diligence to verify each priority venue under your entity, then a short engineering window for credential handoff, infrastructure migration, and ledger continuity. Operators ramp faster than new hires because the backtest CLI output and the architecture docs are written for trading-desk fluency.
Strategic buyers, corp dev, and family offices interested in acquiring PredTrade as a going concern: see project0.io/acquire.
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PredTrade is built on Project0 infrastructure.