Kalshi Lists a Tungsten Hedge for an Ohio Distributor, With Pillar and Susquehanna

Pillar, a hedging startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, said Thursday it used Kalshi’s yes/no event contracts to protect an unnamed Ohio metals distributor against swings in tungsten prices. Susquehanna Predictions, the prediction-market arm of trading firm Susquehanna, helped structure and price the trade and supplied the liquidity to fill it, the three companies said in a joint announcement. The contracts settle Dec. 17 on Shanghai Metals Market’s weekly Rotterdam price for ammonium paratungstate, or APT, the processed tungsten powder the industry prices off.

Tungsten has the highest melting point of any element and goes into armor-piercing rounds, jet engines and cutting tools. The United States has no active tungsten mine production, according to the announcement, and APT prices are up more than 500%, including a jump of as much as 94% in six weeks this spring. Unlike oil, gold or copper, tungsten has never had a listed futures market. “Tungsten is the first, and there’s a long list behind it,” said Nicolas Hull, Kalshi’s director of business development.

CME Group said Monday it plans to list tungsten futures on COMEX by early in the first quarter of 2027, pending regulatory review. CME’s contract will settle on Fastmarkets’ APT price, a different benchmark from the one the Kalshi trade uses.

How the hedge works

A futures contract pays more or less as the price moves. Kalshi’s version is a set of yes/no questions. Will the APT price on the morning of Dec. 17 be above $1,000, $1,500, $1,750, $2,000 or $2,250 per metric ton unit, the industry’s pricing unit? Each contract pays $1 to whoever holds the right answer, and Kalshi takes neither side.

The companies didn’t say how big the hedge is. Kalshi’s market data on Friday morning showed about 83,500 contracts open on each of three lines, $1,750, $2,000 and $2,250, and none on the other two. None had changed hands in the previous 24 hours. At $1 a contract, that’s about $250,000 settling on one morning’s number.

That number comes from a thin market. SMM’s latest weekly assessment, dated Oct. 22, put European APT offers at $2,500 to $3,100, averaging $2,800. “No spot transactions were reported for APT this week,” a trader told SMM, and the publisher described spot trading as “essentially at a standstill,” with long-term contracts above $3,000 and buyers “quite bearish.”

What the lines say

All three active lines sit below that $2,800 average, from about 20% below at $2,250 to about 37% below at $1,750. So the payout turns on how far tungsten could fall by Dec. 17. None of the three companies said which side its client took.

If the rest of Hull’s long list works like tungsten, each new market will start with a single client and a market maker that helped price it, and it will look like a market only after more traders show up.

Sources

• Pillar, Kalshi and Susquehanna Predictions announcement via Business Wire, Oct. 22, 2026: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261021488076/en/
• CME Group, tungsten futures announcement, Oct. 19, 2026: https://www.cmegroup.com/media-room/press-releases/2026/10/19/cme_group_to_launchtungstenfuturestomeetrisingdemandforcriticalm.html
• Kalshi market KXAPTROT, Dec. 17, 2026 event, public market data checked Oct. 23, 2026 at about 10:36 a.m. ET: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxaptrot
• Shanghai Metals Market, CIF Rotterdam 88.5% APT, assessment dated Oct. 22, 2026: https://www.metal.com/tungsten/202511260001
• FOW, “Pillar executes maiden tungsten hedge via Kalshi’s event contract,” Oct. 23, 2026: https://www.fow.com/insights/pillar-executes-maiden-tungsten-hedge-via-kalshis-event-contract