Key Points
- ITS launched four binary event-option contracts on 8 September under AFSA’s FinTech Lab, covering Bitcoin, SpaceX, and two central bank rates, within a derivatives market segment the AFSA describes as previously unavailable in the region.
- Contracts trade between $0.01 and $0.99, with price reflecting collective market-implied probability, settling at $1 or $0 at expiry; no leverage or margin is permitted.
- AFSA classifies these as derivative instruments restricted to financial and economic events only, with political, sporting, and weather contracts explicitly prohibited from the outset.
ITS Puts Binary Event Contracts on Bitcoin, SpaceX and Central Bank Rates Into Live Testing Under AFSA Oversight
A trading platform most observers outside Kazakhstan had never heard of last month just did something that Polymarket and Kalshi have spent years fighting regulators to achieve. On 8 September, Kazakhstan’s ITS launched a live prediction market at its annual ITS Ideas 2026 conference in Astana, offering eligible professional investors the chance to trade the probability of specific financial outcomes. The launch sits inside the Astana International Financial Centre’s FinTech Lab, a controlled regulatory sandbox where new products operate before a permanent framework exists.
The initial four contracts cover whether Bitcoin will sit above a defined reference price, whether SpaceX shares will clear a specified threshold, whether Kazakhstan’s base rate will exceed 16.75 per cent, and whether the upper bound of the US Federal Reserve’s target range will cross 3.75 per cent. Each contract trades as a binary option priced between $0.01 and $0.99. At settlement, the condition is either met or not, and the option pays $1 or $0 accordingly.
How is the Contract Price Probability?
That pricing mechanism is the part most coverage skips. The price of a contract at any moment reflects the market’s collective assessment of the market-implied probability of the event occurring, meaning a Bitcoin contract trading at $0.73 signals that participants collectively assign roughly a 73 per cent chance to the condition being met. ITS CEO Kurmet Orazayev made the logic plain: “Financial markets have long traded asset prices. Today, we are adding another dimension, the ability to trade event probabilities. Investors gain a simple tool to express their view of the future, while the market gains a new mechanism for forming a collective view of that future.”
The exchange is currently active for almost 19 hours each day, integrating the trading sessions of Asia, Europe, and the United States through a single platform. Its total trading volume exceeded $14 billion in 2025, a 70-fold increase compared to the trading volume of the previous year, with 23 traders from seven countries and access to over 3,200 instruments, including US stocks, depositary receipts, and ETFs. Prediction Market builds upon this infrastructure as opposed to being an independent system.
What AFSA Actually Says About Classification
Kazakhstan’s classification decision carries weight precisely because it is the one thing most competing jurisdictions have been unable to agree on. AFSA classifies Event-Based Contracts as derivative instruments whose payout depends on whether a specified future event occurs or does not occur. The framework is explicitly restricted to financial and economic events: movements in securities prices, approved digital assets, commodities, interest rates, exchange rates, and scheduled macroeconomic releases such as inflation, GDP, and central bank rate decisions.
Crucially, the boundary is spelt out in the AFSA notice with no ambiguity. Sporting events, political events, weather, entertainment, and celebrity-related contracts are explicitly prohibited from the permitted scope. AFSA Chief Executive Evgeniya Bogdanova said: “Our approach is deliberately focused on financial and economic events. The FinTech Lab gives AFSA an opportunity to work closely with market participants, understand new business models and risks as they develop, and use the results of testing to inform the future regulatory approach.”
The Global Context That Makes This Significant
The global prediction market industry has a classification problem that regulators everywhere are still working through. Polymarket operates on decentralised infrastructure and has encountered restrictions across multiple markets. Kalshi fought a multi-year legal dispute with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission before establishing its event contracts under commodity derivatives rules. Across Asia, combined monthly trading volume on two of the world’s largest prediction market platforms grew from under $5 billion in September 2025 to roughly $24 billion by April 2026, according to a Pew Research Centre analysis cited by AFSA, reflecting demand that regulators are scrambling to address.
The Asia-Pacific experience shows how difficult that scramble has been. Indonesia blocked Polymarket in May 2026 following bets linked to the country’s president, while in the Philippines, PAGCOR endorsed a blocking order and Globe implemented a network-level restriction, though access remained available through some providers. The core issue in both cases was that prediction products sat at the intersection of gambling, financial trading, and speech with no framework cleanly covering all three.
Kazakhstan is trying a structurally different route. ITS introduced the contracts through its existing licensed exchange, which already operates a central counterparty, meaning settlement risk is managed through standard derivatives clearing rather than bilateral counterparty exposure. AFSA’s AIFC describes itself as an independent jurisdiction backed by the principles of English Common Law, giving international counterparties a documented legal foundation for cross-border engagement. Vladimir Savov, Chief Markets Officer at AFSA, said at the September 8 launch: “We have been working towards this launch for a long time. We studied the experience of other financial centres and looked at how different jurisdictions approach derivatives markets and prediction markets.”
AIFC’s Broader Financial Push Makes the Timing Deliberate
This launch did not arrive in isolation. On 4 September, four days before ITS went live, Binance signed three memoranda of understanding with Kazakhstan’s central bank, its Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, and the AIFC, covering a crypto-fiat gateway, regulatory cooperation, and digital asset education across Central Asia. Binance had already secured its full DATF licence from AFSA on 30 September 2024, announced by CEO Richard Teng on that date, making Kazakhstan the first Central Asian country to fully licence the exchange.
Read together, the Binance agreements and the ITS prediction market launch suggest the AIFC is actively consolidating its position as the region’s regulated financial innovation venue before equivalent frameworks appear elsewhere.
Three Questions the Sandbox Still Needs to Answer
What happens inside the FinTech Lab over the coming months will determine whether this model expands. The sandbox exists precisely because regulators need to observe how these contracts behave before writing permanent rules, and ITS has confirmed it plans to add new events, markets, and scenarios as the testing progresses.
Three questions remain genuinely open. First, whether professional-client-only access creates enough liquidity for meaningful price discovery, or whether the market stays too thin to produce signals worth reading. Second, whether AFSA’s findings will generate a publishable rulebook that other jurisdictions in the region could reference or adopt. Third, whether ITS’s current participant base, 23 firms from seven countries, is sufficient to bring the volume needed for the instrument to work as designed.
Expert Analysis
We think the professional-client restriction is a more significant structural problem than most coverage acknowledges. Prediction markets are useful as information tools precisely because they aggregate knowledge from many people with different exposures to the event in question. A base-rate contract read exclusively by institutional traders who already hold macro positions and follow the National Bank of Kazakhstan closely is unlikely to surface much probability signal that existing financial data does not already carry. The contracts could function well as hedging tools for that audience, but the information-discovery argument, the one AFSA references in its official notice, requires breadth of participation that the current eligibility rules deliberately prevent.
There is also an unresolved tension in the framework that nobody covering this story has pointed out. AFSA’s notice prohibits political events, which is understandable given the regulatory exposure that caused problems in Indonesia and the Philippines. But the most economically valuable future events for a region like Central Asia often sit close to that boundary: a sovereign credit rating change, a major commodity supply disruption, a bilateral trade decision. These are formally economic events, but in a concentrated political economy they carry political dimensions that AFSA’s current guidance does not clearly address. How AFSA draws that line in practice, as ITS eventually proposes contracts beyond its initial four, will reveal whether the framework is genuinely flexible or quietly conservative. The September 8 launch is a real step. Whether it leads somewhere depends entirely on what the regulator learns and is willing to publish.
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