Two former mathletes run one of the biggest, and maybe the least-known, trading firms in Wall Street's hottest market: predicting the future. Founded in 2024 by Zack Chroman and Tanner Hoke, Alcedine Technologies quickly emerged as a top-10 trader across U.S. regulated exchanges. The exchanges include Kalshi, the prediction market whose bets on sports, elections and other events have exploded in popularity with both pros and amateurs alike.
While top market-makers regularly funnel hundreds of millions or billions of dollars a month through prediction markets, Alcedine has almost no public profile. Its website says 'check back later.' Its Kalshi profile is private. Few other prediction-market traders have even heard of the firm.
The founders say they didn't intend to be secretive; they just had other priorities in what has been a whirlwind since they started building Alcedine, which takes its name from a genus of kingfishers, the colorful water birds. In high school, Chroman was a member of the U.S. International Math Olympiad team; Hoke competed in the world championships of competitive programming. After college and internships at powerhouse Jane Street—where they first met—the duo started trading on prediction markets in 2023 and founded Alcedine the next year.
By early 2026, they had acquired Valence, a prediction-market trading firm backed by Y Combinator. Alcedine's team has grown to more than 10 people. Now, the firm is breaking into prediction block trades for hedge funds, family offices and other institutions. 'We're in this to build a durable business,' Hoke said. 'Some people see prediction markets as a way to make as much money as possible right now until it's over.
I think we're much more excited about the future of the space.' Alcedine is at the vanguard of a new type of power users on prediction markets. In some cases, successful individual traders are hiring small teams to support operations, wagering millions of dollars a week on platforms such as Polymarket. Many of them are upstart traders who have ways to use artificial-intelligence tools in trading and markets, deploying teams of bots that monitor minuscule price movements across venues and even place trades.
Venues like Kalshi seek out such traders to boost volumes on their platforms, at times offering individual traders loans to trade on their platforms, traders said. In a race for dominance in this new market, they need high rollers more than ever. Competition for their trading flow is fierce.
Prediction platforms have offered monthly stipends to traders as well as warrants to purchase ownership stakes in their firms. A spokesperson for Kalshi said its exchange arm doesn't offer loans and, if they are offered by an affiliate, they aren't tied to volume requirements. A spokesperson for Polymarket said that wider participation in prediction markets 'deepens liquidity, sharpens price discovery and produces more accurate forecasts' that benefit everyone.
The upstarts are now considering raising capital from friends or family investors, or traditional Wall Street firms, to capitalize on the boom in trading. Some event-contract traders come from the world of sports betting. Others, like Chroman and Hoke, are recent college graduates with math and quant backgrounds.
They are hungry to exploit their edge in a market that has been swarmed by recreational traders betting on sports and elections—while it lasts. While most part-time traders lack these pros' computational prowess or technological advantages, the market's growth will continue to draw other sophisticated players. Bob Fitzsimmons, executive vice president at Wedbush Securities, said he is pitched several times a month by groups of 20-something traders looking to raise money. 'They are in their parents' basements making markets,' Fitzsimmons said. 'That's where some of the explosive growth is coming from.'.
Source: Wall Street Journal Markets · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing