Think the 2026 World Cup is just about teams winning or losing? The off-field prediction markets have quietly come of age.

Written by: Fuguo

Recently, the crypto space has seen one farce after another. SpaceX's IPO was hot for a while, but when it actually landed, it was a mess. Even the yearly proclaimed DeFi Summer has grown weak. Back in May, VC transactions hit a new low not seen since before 2021, with about 50 deals for the whole month. Just when everyone thought the industry had entered a sage mode.

The World Cup is here! In fact, since May, the prediction markets have been bustling first. Not only Polymarket, Kalshi has also surged nearly thirty times, and CEXs have all squeezed in. Even traditional brokers like Robinhood have flooded in, and this narrative seems unstoppable.

Making money is never noisy; places that are noisy don't make money—but prediction markets might be an exception.‌

From Trump to the World Cup: Two Breakthroughs for Prediction Markets

Prediction markets, to put it simply, are voting with money. Its history is much longer than most people think, from the academic experiments at the University of Iowa in the 1990s, to Intrade in the 2000s, and then PredictIt in 2014. It has long been a niche toy for scholars and geeks.

The real turning point occurred in 2024. The presidential election between Trump and Biden (and later Harris) brought prediction markets into the public eye for the first time. With over $3.6 billion in trading volume on Polymarket, the narrative of "aggregating information with money" became incredibly attractive. Media began to compare market probabilities with polling data, with The New York Times and CNBC vying to quote them. The market's reaction speed to events like debates and judicial rulings far surpassed that of polls, and was later validated as "a more accurate truth machine." The prediction market transformed from a financial tool into a highly engaging political entertainment product.

After the election, the momentum didn't fade; rather, it completed its financial enlightenment. In 2025, prediction markets officially surfaced as a mainstream financial force, with traders betting billions of dollars on various wagers ranging from NFL games to Federal Reserve interest rate decisions. The duopoly formed by Polymarket and Kalshi created over $44 billion in total trading volume that year, comparable to the GDP of a small country.

Data from the Pew Research Center shows that the monthly trading volume of the two platforms skyrocketed from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion in April 2026—this figure has surpassed the average monthly betting amount in legal sports betting in the U.S. Prediction markets began to operate like traditional financial exchanges: probabilities were priced, events standardized, and the uncertainties of the real world turned into an asset that could be high-frequency traded.

The 2026 World Cup simply pushed this already high-speed machine to an even higher RPM and switched to a more public display.‌

The Oligopoly Battle: The Triple Barriers of Depth, Compliance, and Infrastructure

After 2024, the industry landscape became briefly clear: Polymarket focused on global decentralized traffic, while Kalshi catered to compliant U.S. users. However, under the spotlight of the World Cup, this simple binary was disrupted, and the competition evolved into a multidimensional war on liquidity, compliance distribution, and trading infrastructure.

Polymarket: The absolute king of liquidity. Its moat is simple and brutal: super deep liquidity of a single flagship contract. As of mid-June 2026, its "World Cup Champion" market has accumulated trading volume exceeding $2 billion, with a single-day trading volume of $118 million on the first day of the tournament. The liquidity pool of this single market exceeds $48 million and even reaches over $100 million, allowing for significant capital movements with almost no slippage. This depth of "one market determining everything" is something other platforms cannot replicate in the short term. It covers the globe (though with restrictions for U.S. users), settles in USDC, and has become the main battleground for crypto-native users and global speculators. In April 2026, its monthly trading volume reached $9 billion, capturing 28% of the market share.

Kalshi: The king of compliance barriers and channel distribution. Kalshi chose a different path. As the first event contract exchange in the U.S. to obtain CFTC approval, compliance is its strongest asset. This allows it to legally access tens of millions of U.S. users and serve as a foundational contract supplier for platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase. Through Robinhood’s 27 million active accounts and Coinbase’s massive user base, Kalshi achieved exponential growth in traffic. In May 2026, Kalshi's monthly trading volume surged to $17.9 billion, controlling 58% of the global prediction market share, nearly double that of Polymarket. Its strategy prioritizes breadth, launching over 424 World Cup-related markets to meet the diverse needs of retail investors with rich contract types.

Hyperliquid: The king of perpetual contracts strikes from a lower dimension. In May 2026, the DeFi derivatives giant Hyperliquid, with a total locked value (TVL) exceeding $5.5 billion, officially entered the arena. The HIP-4 event contracts (Outcomes) it launched are not simple copies but rather turn prediction markets into native binary options, sharing the same account and margin pool with perpetual contracts. This means traders can use the same USDC account to simultaneously conduct high-leverage perpetual trading and event prediction hedging, with the system automatically identifying risks and releasing margins.‌ This represents a funding efficiency revolution that neither Polymarket nor Kalshi can achieve.‌ Hyperliquid comes with its inherent advantages of a high liquidity order book and almost zero trading fees, not to take a slice of the pie but to redefine the rules of the game.

The market has evolved from a duel to a more complex layered structure: Kalshi takes the lead in volume (424 markets), while Polymarket crushes the core battlefield with depth ($2 billion in a single champion market). Hyperliquid, on the other hand, is reconstructing the underlying settlement board.

The Varied Faces of New Entrants: Official, Dark Horses, and Long-tail Competition

Under the spotlight of the World Cup, besides the giants, there are also a group of newcomers trying to grab a piece of the pie, each with vastly different circumstances.

ADI PredictStreet (official yet lukewarm): As FIFA's first official prediction market partner, it comes from a prestigious background (Abu Dhabi royal family) and has solid technology (ADI Chain + Chainlink oracle). However, it went live just three days before the tournament (June 8) and had a dismal trading volume at launch, almost zero transactions. This exposed the awkwardness of brand licensing in the prediction market space: IP glitz cannot directly convert to liquidity; execution capability is key.

Rain Protocol (infrastructure dark horse): As a decentralized prediction market infrastructure protocol deployed on Arbitrum, Rain does not pursue front-end traffic but focuses on underlying infrastructure. Before the World Cup, its foundation invested $100 million in dedicated liquidity, pushing its protocol TVL to $125.4 million, placing it among the top three globally. It attracted many local communities in Latin America and Southeast Asia to rapidly build prediction applications based on its protocol, becoming a key variable breaking the duopoly structure.

OmenX (rapidly growing newcomer): Developed natively on the Base chain, this leveraged prediction market saw a 210% quarter-over-quarter growth in new users on the opening day. Its transaction volume for a single event (e.g., South Korea vs. Czech Republic reaching $1.78 million) has reached 30%-40% of Polymarket's for the same event, making it one of the fastest-growing dark horses of this World Cup.

Long-tail competitors (Opinion, Predict.fun, Probable): During the market peak in January, they collectively held nearly 20% of the market share, but under the pressure of giants and the siphoning effect of the World Cup, their survival space has been drastically compressed.

The Gamble of Traditional Players: Brokers and CEXs Enter and True Increment

An ironic paradox is occurring: while crypto primary market VC financing has plummeted to a freezing point (only about 50 transactions in May 2026), secondary trading in prediction markets is heating up madly.

Traditional financial giants are casting their votes with their feet, betting heavily on this new track:

Robinhood: Officially launched event contracts on the opening day of the World Cup through Rothera, a jointly owned CFTC licensed clearinghouse with Susquehanna. Its prediction market business achieved an annualized revenue of $415 million in the first quarter of 2026, with Bernstein predicting this revenue will reach $586 million for the full year, accounting for 17% of the company's trading revenue.

Coinbase: Partnering with Kalshi, it launched a prediction market in early 2026, quickly reaching an annualized revenue exceeding $100 million within just two months, with sports-related contracts accounting for 39% of its prediction business trading volume.

DraftKings: Its prediction business saw an annualized consumer trading volume of $1.3 billion in May, a quarter-over-quarter growth of 24%. It precisely targets the Spanish-speaking market, which makes up 52% of the U.S. population, by leveraging a media partnership with Telemundo and a Spanish-native app, which Bernstein views as the most significant fundamental meaning of this event—not a stock game, but transforming the population of sports betting into prediction market participants, including Robinhood retail users.

The institutional entry goes beyond just traffic. In April 2026, Kalshi completed the first large-scale transaction on a prediction market platform—between an environmental hedge fund and a market maker (Jump Trading) regarding the California power market clearing price contract. This indicates that institutions have begun to use prediction markets as an event risk hedging tool, which is functionality that traditional betting has never had.

Where is the real increment?‌

Research estimates that about 30% of Polymarket's offshore trading volume (around $16.7 billion over the past year) actually comes from U.S. capital unable to access compliance. The rise of the World Cup and compliant platforms is prompting this portion of "grey demand" to migrate to compliant channels like DraftKings, Robinhood, and Coinbase. This is the cold and solid financial logic behind the explosion of this track.

This is not the end, but a coming-of-age ceremony for a new asset class

The World Cup is a watershed moment. But what's truly interesting is not who can win the championship, but the dual transformation happening in the prediction market space.

Internally, Polymarket, Kalshi, and Hyperliquid's three technical routes are evolving in parallel, each building high walls in liquidity depth, compliance distribution, and trading infrastructure. New players like Rain and OmenX are cutting in from the protocol layer and vertical experiences, seeking market gaps.

Externally, the regulatory tug-of-war between the CFTC and state governments is becoming clearer (in June 2026, the CFTC proposed rules that greenlit sports predictions), while traditional brokers' channel access and institutional funds' slow entry are pushing prediction markets from the fringes of the crypto space into the toolbox of mainstream finance.

Bernstein predicts that total trading volume in prediction markets will grow from approximately $51 billion in 2025 to $1 trillion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of about 80%. The total volume for 2026 is estimated at $240 billion.

The true maturity of an industry often isn't in the moment of explosive growth, but in when all participants—whether they are retail investors, institutions, platforms, or regulators—begin to realize: this is no longer a lively game but a brand new asset class based on pricing global information and beliefs.‌

The ball is rolling. Money is rolling too.

Perhaps at the next hotspot, there will be many more people sitting at this table than there are today. And the ways of playing on the table will probably look entirely different.