Regulations
By Jean-Luc Maracon
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Financial Contracts Are Taking Over. The real driver here isn't sports bets. It's financial contracts — crypto, equities, commodities.
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Cboe Wants SEC Approval for Binary Options on 23 Companies. Cboe is pushing into territory that goes well beyond tracking whether Bitcoin closes above a round…
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Legal Fog Won't Lift Until 2027 at the Earliest. Here's the messy part. The firm doesn't think full regulatory clarity is coming anytime soon —…
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Prediction markets are growing fast. Really fast. A research firm just revised its forecast upward, now projecting roughly $410 billion in trading volume for 2026 — a 71% jump…
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The bigger headline is what's sitting at the end of the runway. The same firm sees annual prediction-market volume potentially reaching $10 trillion by 2035.
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The real driver here isn't sports bets. It's financial contracts — crypto, equities, commodities. Right now, financial-asset contracts hold about 12% of prediction-market volume.
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The data from 2026 already backs up the shift. Crypto's share of Kalshi's trading volume went from under 5% in January to around 20% by August. Eight months.
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Sports contracts haven't collapsed, though. On Polymarket, sports still account for around 52% of global volume through August.
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What separates these from standard event contracts is the infrastructure behind them. They'd trade through securities options platforms, not the prediction-market venues people…
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More context: Bernstein Predicts $10 Trillion Prediction Markets Driven by Financial Assets by 2035
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But the direction is clear. If Cboe gets the green light, it opens a lane for contracts that let traders bet on whether a company hits a specific production number or subscriber…
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Here's the messy part. The firm doesn't think full regulatory clarity is coming anytime soon — probably not until 2027 or 2028, and that's assuming ongoing legal disputes get…
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That legal uncertainty isn't just an abstract concern. It shapes what platforms can offer, where they can operate, and how aggressively they can grow the sports side of the book.
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The firm's broader argument is that prediction markets don't need to dominate anything to get massive. If they can capture just 0.
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Read also: Senate Rejects CLARITY Act, Leaving Crypto Firms Burdened by Full AML Requirements
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