Kalshi Hits $10 Billion Weekly Volume as World Cup Drives Prediction Market Boom

Kalshi just crossed $10 billion in weekly notional volume. First time ever. The milestone landed during the FIFA World Cup, and the timing wasn’t a coincidence — it’s basically the clearest proof yet that prediction markets run on big events, not on crypto cycles.

Within the first eleven days of the tournament, Kalshi processed $2.9 billion in World Cup trades alone. To put that in perspective, it beat the platform’s entire March Madness volume in under two weeks. Polymarket didn’t sit still either — it surpassed $5 billion in football market trades during the same stretch. Compare that to the $138,000 traded on Polymarket during the 2022 World Cup and you start to understand how fast this space has moved. Four years. Roughly 36,000 times more volume. That’s not growth. That’s a different industry.

Revenue Numbers That Demand Attention

Kalshi’s annual revenue has crossed $2 billion. That puts it in uncomfortable proximity to some pretty established financial players, and it’s forcing a real valuation debate. The platform carries a $22 billion valuation right now, but investors can’t seem to agree on what Kalshi actually is — a brokerage, an exchange, or a betting app. Each framing implies a different multiple, a different regulatory posture, a different long-term ceiling. Unclear yet which framing wins.

Polymarket’s numbers are moving fast too. The platform reported over $1 billion in annualized revenue shortly after launching its US exchange. And the sector as a whole? Projections put it at $10 billion in annual revenue by 2030. No specific attribution on that figure, but the direction of travel seems pretty hard to argue with given the current trajectory.

Who’s Actually Using These Platforms

Here’s the part that probably surprises people. A Bitget Wallet study of 857,000 active Polymarket users found that 60% had zero prior on-chain trading history before they landed on the platform. None. They didn’t come from DeFi. They didn’t migrate from a DEX. They just showed up, probably chasing a World Cup match or an election outcome.

And once they got there, they stayed active. Those users averaged 1,194 interactions on the platform over 90 days. For context, the same group averaged just 12 decentralized exchange trades over that same window. The prediction market pulled roughly 100 times more engagement than a DEX did. That’s a pretty striking gap.

Toni Gemayel, Coinbase’s Head of Prediction Markets, put a number on the behavioral split. About 1% of users treat prediction markets the way they’d treat any other financial asset — tracking positions, thinking about exposure, managing risk. The other 99% are basically using the platforms as an alternative to watching TV or scrolling a news feed. They want to have skin in the game on something happening in the real world right now.

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That’s not a criticism. It’s actually probably the whole business model.

The Event Dependency Problem

But it does raise a question nobody’s fully answered yet. What happens when the big events stop?

The World Cup runs every four years. Elections cluster. March Madness is one month. If 60% of your user base has no prior trading history and came specifically because a major event pulled them in, it’s not obvious they stick around for quieter stretches. Gemayel acknowledged the uncertainty — future engagement is genuinely unclear if major event catalysts aren’t there. He didn’t sugarcoat it.

So the platforms are kind of caught in an interesting bind. Their growth story is real, the revenue is real, the volume records are real. And yet the engine that’s driving all of it is basically a calendar of high-profile global moments. Kalshi and Polymarket have shown they can scale fast when something big is happening. The harder test is probably what the numbers look like in a slow month.

Read also: Fundstrat Strategist Tells Crypto Holders to Sit Tight Through Market Chaos

For now, the slow months aren’t the story. The $10 billion weekly record is. Polymarket’s $5 billion in football trades is. The 857,000 users who mostly didn’t know what a DEX was before they started betting on match outcomes — they’re the story too.

Whether prediction markets can hold that audience between World Cups, between elections, between whatever the next massive catalyst turns out to be — that’s the open question. The platforms are betting they can build enough habit and enough product variety to keep people coming back. Maybe they’re right. Probably takes another year or two of data to know for sure.

Kalshi’s $22 billion valuation is riding on the answer.