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Story: Polymarket Hits $2 Billion on World Cup While Kalshi Pulls $137M in Fees

By Jean-Luc Maracon

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May Numbers Were Staggering Across the Board. May was a record month. Prediction markets collectively turned over $31.

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Polymarket's $2 Billion Pool vs. Kalshi's 48 Markets. Polymarket's World Cup winner market sits at $2 billion in lifetime bets.

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What the Fee Gap Actually Means. $137.86 million versus $28.07 million. In one month.

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Polymarket's single World Cup winner market crossed $2 billion in total bets. Kalshi, meanwhile, spread its football action across 48 separate match-level books — and pulled in…

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The gap between those two numbers tells you pretty much everything about how these platforms are built. Polymarket concentrates liquidity into one massive pool.

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May was a record month. Prediction markets collectively turned over $31.2 billion — a figure that would have seemed absurd even two years ago. Kalshi took 58% of that flow.

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Sports predictions have basically eaten the rest of the prediction market menu. Crypto markets, political betting, economic forecasts — all of it is getting overshadowed by…

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Polymarket's World Cup winner market sits at $2 billion in lifetime bets. Kalshi's 48 World Cup markets combined reached $182.3 million.

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But Kalshi isn't really competing for that same bettor.

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Read also: Avalanche Treasury Drops 16% on Nasdaq Debut as AVAX Hits Five-Year Low

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Kalshi's match-level books target people who want to bet on Tuesday's specific game, not the tournament winner six weeks from now. Those bettors are different.

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And the group stage helps Kalshi's model specifically. Daily games mean daily markets, daily volume, daily fees.

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$137.86 million versus $28.07 million. In one month. That's the fee gap between Kalshi and Polymarket in May, and it's worth sitting with for a second.

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Fee revenue is how you run a business. Volume is how you attract press. Polymarket gets the headlines because $2 billion in a single market is a genuinely wild number and easy to…

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Sports categories have now overtaken crypto and politics on every major prediction platform. That's not just a Kalshi or Polymarket story — it's an industry-wide reorientation.

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