Galactic entered the U.S. prediction market business last year with a unique pitch: rather than compete directly with exchanges, it would help major media companies put prediction markets alongside the content their audiences were already reading.
Sports Illustrated signed on first, and SI Predict eventually went live. Months later, TIME announced its own deal, with a Predictor.io-powered platform scheduled to launch in early 2026.
Then the ambitious media push largely disappeared from view. SI Predict paused its markets on July 29, 2025, and, more than a year later, still says it is building a “2.0” platform. TIME’s promised early-2026 prediction market launch never materialized publicly.
There are now some clues about what was happening behind the scenes. Predictor LLC, Galactic’s U.S. subsidiary, received approval on July 22 as a National Futures Association-registered introducing broker (IB), completing a regulatory process Galactic had been working toward since last year. Just days before SI Predict paused, Galactic announced an agreement with an unnamed futures commission merchant (FCM) and plans to pursue NFA registration. Predictor’s current terms now identify the company as a registered IB providing its platform through regulated third-party financial infrastructure.
There is another intriguing clue about the rebuilt platform: search-engine results for Predictor’s development and testing sites show it using exact Kalshi event contract identifiers. The evidence points to Predictor testing with Kalshi markets, though neither company has announced a partnership and it remains unclear what role, if any, Kalshi could play in an eventual launch.
The pieces suggest Galactic may finally be preparing to revive the media prediction market strategy it unveiled last year, this time through a regulated U.S. brokerage structure and potentially with Kalshi supplying the underlying markets.
Inside Galactic’s stalled media prediction market push
Galactic Media Management is a U.K.-based media technology company, which Stuart Stott and Alan Vey co-founded. Rather than operate its own large consumer prediction exchange, Galactic has pitched itself as the technology layer that lets publishers integrate prediction markets into their existing products and turn audience interest into a new form of engagement.
That was the idea behind SI Predict. When Galactic and Sports Illustrated announced the partnership in March 2025, they described a platform where users could trade on sports-adjacent questions while remaining inside an SI-branded experience. Stott, Galactic’s CEO, said at the time that “sports viewership is no longer a one-way conversation,” arguing that fans increasingly wanted to participate rather than simply watch.
The launch materials also said SI Predict was being built within a “secure, regulatory-compliant framework,” while using blockchain technology behind the scenes. But the original model was quite different from the regulated brokerage structure Galactic is now assembling. SI Predict initially operated as a noncustodial crypto-based platform, with users trading in USDC rather than through a conventional futures brokerage account.
Galactic’s current structure separates those roles more clearly. Predictor LLC is a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Galactic and the newly registered IB, while Predictor.io is the consumer- and publisher-facing product it operates. Predictor’s current site still shows the same core idea Galactic started with: a prediction market embedded directly inside a news story, with publishers invited to add Predictor markets to their articles.
A year-long regulatory rebuild
The contrast with the original SI Predict setup is pretty striking. Its original terms, last updated in May 2025, described a noncustodial platform running event contracts on the Truth Network blockchain, with users connecting digital wallets and using third-party services to move between fiat and crypto. The terms also warned that the regulatory environment for event contracts was uncertain and said Galactic did not represent that the contracts complied with the Commodity Exchange Act or other U.S. laws.
By July 2025, Galactic was publicly signaling a different approach. The company announced plans to pursue NFA registration alongside a partnership with an unnamed U.S. FCM, a move Stott said would “enhance our platform’s regulatory foundation.” Galactic said the FCM would be formally identified “in the coming weeks” and that new U.S. partner markets were expected to launch in the fourth quarter. Neither announcement appears to have followed. Four days later, SI Predict paused trading.
Predictor LLC subsequently applied for NFA membership and registration as both an IB and swap firm, a process that was still pending when the TIME partnership was announced in November 2025. Those approvals finally came on July 22, nearly a year after Galactic first announced its regulatory overhaul.
Conventional derivatives system
The IB registration gives the new Predictor a much more conventional role in the U.S. derivatives system. An IB can solicit or accept customer orders but cannot hold the money or other assets supporting them.
Predictor’s current terms say it will not hold customer funds or clear transactions itself, instead relying where applicable on regulated third parties, including an FCM, exchange and clearing organization.
NFA records still list Predictor as an inactive member because it has reported that it does not yet have customers engaged in commodity-interest business or solicit customers for that business. But it is already building an audience ahead of launch. Predictor’s current site is accepting waitlist signups promising priority access to launch updates and onboarding, and also presents Predictor as a planned standalone trading platform alongside its pitch to embed markets directly into publishers’ articles.
Kalshi contracts surface in Predictor’s test build
The clearest clue about what exchange could power the rebuilt Predictor comes from pages that apparently were never intended for a broad audience. Search-engine indexes preserved market pages from Predictor’s qa.predictor.io and dev.predictor.io testing environments. The indexed URLs include Kalshi event tickers like KXUKPARTY-29, KXSB-27, KXG7LEADEROUT-45JAN01, KXBTCMAX125-1, KXGTA6SONGS-30 and KXNATIONALIZESPACEX.
Those are exact Kalshi event contract identifiers. They correspond to Kalshi markets on the next U.K. election, the 2027 NFL champion, the next G7 leader to leave office, when Bitcoin would hit $125,000, songs expected on the Grand Theft Auto VI radio at launch, and whether the U.S. would begin nationalizing SpaceX. Some indexed Predictor development pages also carried SI Predict branding in their search snippets, showing that at least some of the test pages were configured for the Sports Illustrated product.
The breadth of the matches suggests Predictor was doing more than borrowing an isolated market as a placeholder. Its test environment contained Kalshi contracts across sports, politics, crypto, entertainment and other categories. Still, the evidence does not establish a formal partnership. Development sites can populate with third-party market data for testing, and neither Galactic nor Kalshi has publicly announced an agreement.
If the testing reflects Predictor’s intended launch structure, however, the pieces fit neatly. Predictor could serve as the regulated IB and publisher-facing trading interface while Kalshi supplies the underlying event contracts. Kalshi’s exchange rules already contemplate IBs submitting customer orders to the exchange, meaning a setup along those lines would fit within infrastructure Kalshi has built for third-party distribution.
A different kind of media integration
If Kalshi ultimately does supply markets to Predictor, the arrangement would go beyond the exchange’s existing partnerships with major news organizations. Kalshi’s CNN partnership integrates its probabilities and market data into the network’s reporting and on-air coverage, while its CNBC deal similarly incorporates prediction data across the network’s TV, digital and subscription products. Neither deal lets readers trade Kalshi contracts directly from the news coverage itself.
Predictor is pitching a deeper integration. Its site shows a tradeable market placed inside a news article and invites publishers to embed Predictor markets directly into their coverage. If its Kalshi testing reflects the eventual product, the same infrastructure could power both a standalone Predictor platform and publisher-branded experiences, with Predictor handling the customer-facing brokerage layer while Kalshi supplies the underlying markets.
There are still important questions. Galactic and Kalshi have not announced a partnership, the FCM that Galactic said it had lined up last year remains unidentified, and neither SI Predict nor TIME has announced a new launch date. But with Predictor’s regulatory approval complete, a consumer waitlist now live and Kalshi contracts showing up in its development environment, there is finally a clearer picture of what Galactic’s long-stalled media prediction market push could become.
