The Problem: Power Markets Are Moving Faster Than the Tools Designed to Manage Them
Day-ahead and intraday power markets have entered a new era of volatility. Renewable intermittency, rapid demand swings driven by electrification and digital infrastructure, and the expanding role of flexible assets like battery energy storage systems (BESS) are compressing price risk into shorter and shorter intervals.
Imbalance markets illustrate this most sharply. Deviations between forecasted and actual generation or load can trigger significant pricing dislocations within a single settlement period. BESS operators, renewable developers, and commodity desks managing short-term exposure are increasingly finding that the instruments available to them do not reflect the operational reality they are trying to hedge.
The issue is not that traditional energy derivatives have become irrelevant. It is that they were not designed for this level of granularity.
Why Standard Futures Fall Short at the Short End
A monthly or quarterly futures contract embeds a wide range of market drivers into a single price: supply expectations, fuel costs, weather assumptions, macroeconomic conditions, and more. That breadth makes these instruments well-suited to structural hedging. It makes them poorly suited to isolating a discrete, near-term risk event.
Consider the position of a BESS operator whose exposure is concentrated in a two-hour intraday window following a forecast wind ramp. A quarterly futures contract cannot isolate that risk. A day-ahead strip gets closer but still bundles unrelated price drivers. Neither instrument gives the operator a clean hedge against the specific event creating their exposure.
This is the gap Inframarkets is designed to fill.
Introducing Event Contracts: Precision Instruments for Defined Market Outcomes
Inframarkets introduces event contracts, a new category of standardized energy volatility cash-settled instruments that converts a clearly defined market outcome into a tradable, financially settled position.
Rather than pricing aggregated expectations across a broad delivery period, each event contract is anchored to a specific, observable market event: whether a day-ahead price exceeds a defined threshold, whether an imbalance price crosses a trigger level within a given interval, or how much renewable generation is recorded during a specified hour.
Each contract is built around five core elements:
- A defined payout structure tied to a binary or scalar outcome
- A specified official data feed as the reference settlement source
- A precise observation timestamp established at contract inception
- Standardized contract specifications across the contract suite
- A documented fallback framework for data delays or provisional values
For a commodity desk, it means isolating a single risk factor rather than absorbing basis from unrelated drivers. For a renewable developer, it means hedging against a generation outcome within the interval that actually matters. For a BESS operator, this means an instrument that settles on the same signal driving their dispatch decision.
Deterministic Settlement: Removing Ambiguity from Resolution
Settlement mechanics are where many novel instruments introduce operational risk. Inframarkets addresses this directly through a deterministic resolution framework.
Each contract resolves to the first published official value from the designated data source (i.e. ISOs, TSO, etc.) at the predefined timestamp. The reference source and observation time are fixed at contract inception, so all participants share an identical understanding of how and when the contract will settle before they enter a position. A documented fallback framework governs scenarios where official data is delayed or subject to revision, ensuring the resolution process remains defined even in edge cases.
For institutional risk managers and commodity desks, this matters. Auditability, repeatability, and predictability of settlement are prerequisites for incorporating any instrument into a managed book. The deterministic structure satisfies those requirements without requiring bespoke legal negotiation around resolution terms.
Built for Professional Trading Infrastructure
Inframarkets is designed to integrate into professional trading workflows from the ground up. The platform operates on a central limit order book execution model and provides API access to support systematic and quantitative strategies.
This enables institutional desks to connect energy hedging directly to existing risk systems, automate order placement around operational triggers, and manage positions with the same infrastructure they use across other markets. Rather than requiring a separate workflow, event contract execution can sit alongside existing energy and commodity trading operations.
The platform’s infrastructure orientation is deliberate. Inframarkets is built for institutions that need to manage risk operationally, and also for participants seeking unstructured speculative exposure thanks to their market insights.
Fully Collateralized: Defined Risk from the Moment a Position Is Opened
Inframarkets operates on a fully collateralized model. Every participant must post sufficient collateral to cover the maximum potential loss of their position before any order is placed or matched.
The practical implications are significant for institutional risk management:
- Maximum downside is fixed and known at entry
- Positions are pre-funded, eliminating margin call mechanics
- There are no forced liquidation events driven by mark-to-market moves
- Settlement occurs promptly upon resolution without unsecured counterparty exposure
For participants managing short-term energy books where operational precision matters, knowing the exact boundary of a position’s loss is not a convenience, it is a structural requirement.
Participant-Created Contracts: Hedging on Your Terms
Most exchange-traded markets offer participants a fixed product catalogue. Inframarkets takes a different approach: any participant can submit their own event contract for listing on the platform.
Using Inframarkets’ pre-vetted library of data sources, participants can define the parameters of a contract themselves – the market event or outcome being observed, the threshold or settlement structure, the observation timestamp, the time period, and the frequency of settlement. If a commodity desk has a specific intraday exposure that no existing contract addresses, they can structure an instrument around it directly and bring it to market.
This transforms Inframarkets from a venue with a fixed set of products into a two-sided market for energy risk. Participants with idiosyncratic exposures are not forced to approximate their hedge with a product designed for someone else’s book. Liquidity providers and other market participants can engage with contracts that reflect real operational demand rather than speculative construction.
The pre-vetted data source framework is what makes this possible at scale. Because all reference settlement sources are approved and standardized in advance, participant-created contracts inherit the same deterministic resolution properties as any other instrument on the platform. The flexibility sits in the contract design. The integrity of settlement is preserved regardless of who originated the contract.
Private Beta: Now Onboarding Institutional Participants
Inframarkets is currently rolling out its private beta, with onboarding focused on trading desks, utilities, renewable developers, and power markets liquidity providers. The phased launch allows professional participants to evaluate event contracts in a controlled environment and integrate them into existing workflows ahead of broader market expansion.
Interested institutions are encouraged to engage directly through the channels below to discuss onboarding, reference market coverage, and contract specifications.
As volatility in day-ahead, intraday, and imbalance markets continues to intensify, the case for instruments that reflect the actual structure of that volatility grows stronger. Inframarkets offers a new financial instrument for energy hedging built around operational precision, deterministic settlement, and institutional-grade execution infrastructure.
Follow Inframarkets on X: https://x.com/Inframarkets n Follow Inframarkets on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inframarkets/
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This release was published under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.
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