Author: Nancy, PANews

The 2026 FIFA World Cup in the USA, Canada, and Mexico has concluded, with Spain defeating Argentina in extra time to lift the World Cup trophy again after 16 years. However, the impact of this global sporting extravaganza did not stop on the football field. Off the field, prediction markets are becoming the "hidden winners" of the World Cup.

During the World Cup, prediction markets attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in trading volume, and the market share of traditional betting giants was significantly eroded for the first time.

Meanwhile, the competitive landscape within the prediction market is rapidly differentiating. Kalshi, leveraging its compliance advantages and capital backing, has repeatedly broken trading records, further widening its lead. While Polymarket has achieved rapid expansion, it still faces multiple pressures from regulatory challenges, its business model, and intensifying competition. The World Cup has become a significant catalyst for the popularization of prediction markets. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide following the results of matches, prediction trading surrounding team wins and losses, and the determination of champions, has rapidly heated up, attracting a large influx of capital and users to this emerging market. According to Dune data, during the World Cup from June 11 to July 19, 2026, the cumulative nominal trading volume in the prediction market will reach tens of billions of dollars. Specifically, the nominal trading volume in June alone exceeded $49.95 billion, and July has already seen $36.37 billion in transactions completed so far. In comparison, the nominal trading volume in May was approximately $30 billion. The World Cup has undoubtedly become a crucial traffic driver for the growth of the prediction market, significantly accelerating the influx of market funds and users. Taking the two core players, Kalshi and Polymarket, as examples, Dune data shows that Kalshi's sports section currently accounts for the highest weekly nominal trading volume, reaching 80.7%; Polymarket's sports-related trading volume also reaches 46.3%. On the Kalshi platform alone, the trading volume of prediction contracts surrounding the "World Cup champion" has exceeded $1.2 billion, setting a new record for the platform's single prediction market. To some extent, leveraging the global influence of the World Cup, the prediction market has reached mainstream sports consumers on a large scale for the first time, propelling it from the crypto and financial sectors into the mass market. The rise of prediction markets has also changed the competitive landscape of the sports betting industry. For decades, sports betting has been dominated by traditional betting companies. However, with prediction markets gaining massive exposure for the first time at a global event like the World Cup, their user growth and transaction volume have begun to attract industry attention. US sports betting platforms, including DraftKings and FanDuel, have begun exploring prediction market-related businesses. Meanwhile, the traditional betting industry is facing new growth pressures. According to a report by mobile app data analytics company Apptopia, daily active users (DAU) of traditional sports betting platforms such as DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and Caesars peaked on the fourth day after the start of the World Cup, subsequently declining. By the end of June, DraftKings and FanDuel's DAU had decreased by 36% and 41% respectively from their peak. In contrast, prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket maintained growth. As of June 30, Kalshi's DAU increased by 36% from June 15, and Polymarket's increased by 12%. During June, these two platforms contributed nearly half of the new active users for the six major betting apps, with Kalshi accounting for 38%. Download numbers also showed significant differences. Apptopia pointed out that in June, Kalshi and Polymarket together accounted for 78.5% of the total installations of the six sports betting platforms, meaning that new users are increasingly choosing prediction markets as their first betting entry point. More noteworthy is the increase in the proportion of users using both DraftKings and Kalshi during the World Cup, but the number of users migrating from Kalshi to traditional sports betting platforms did not increase proportionally. This suggests that traditional betting users are attempting to capitalize on the prediction market, while prediction market users have not yet massively shifted to traditional betting. Changes in market share also confirm this trend. According to estimates by research firm H2 Gambling Capital based on publicly available data from the first month of the World Cup, prediction market trading volume has already accounted for approximately 27% of total legal sports betting trading volume in the United States, a significant increase from approximately 9% at the beginning of the year. It's important to note that because prediction markets and traditional sports betting use different transaction statistics, and betting companies haven't yet released their latest internal data for the World Cup, a completely equivalent comparison cannot be made. However, it's undeniable that the World Cup is becoming a crucial turning point in the development of prediction markets. It has not only helped prediction platforms complete a large-scale user education campaign but is also propelling the sports betting industry into a new competitive phase. However, whether the traffic dividend brought by the World Cup can be converted into long-term user assets remains the core challenge facing the prediction market. Behind the World Cup traffic battle, the prediction market landscape is also quietly changing. Taking July data as an example, in terms of monthly trading volume, The Block data shows that Kalshi and Polymarket (including Polymarket US) had a combined trading volume of approximately $257.6 billion in June, an increase of approximately 25.4% from $205.4 billion in May. Kalshi's trading volume exceeded $147.05 billion, while Polymarket and Polymarket US's combined trading volume reached $110.55 billion, with the former's trading volume exceeding the latter by 1.3 times. Compared to the same period in 2025, Polymarket previously held a greater advantage, with its monthly trading volume being 4.6 times that of Kalshi. Meanwhile, in terms of market share, Kalshi currently holds approximately 73.2% of the prediction market trading share, while Polymarket and its US operations combined account for approximately 26.8%. In comparison, Polymarket's market share reached 36.7% in July of last year, indicating a significant squeeze over the past year. In terms of user growth, the gap between the two platforms is also widening. According to Kalshi, who spoke to CNBC, the company gained 3 million new users during the World Cup. In contrast, according to Dune data, while Polymarket has accumulated over 3.09 million unique users, it only added approximately 274,000 new users in June and July. At the capital markets level, the valuation gap between the two companies is also widening. In June, the Financial Times reported that Kalshi was seeking a new round of financing, potentially raising its valuation to $40 billion, with the financing possibly completed as early as the third quarter of this year. In comparison, Polymarket's current valuation is approximately $15 billion. This series of data indicates that the competitive landscape of the prediction market is reversing. Leveraging its compliance advantages, institutional partnerships, and mainstream market channel presence, Kalshi is gradually establishing a leading position; while Polymarket, despite its rapid rise based on its crypto-native model and global user base, is facing multiple challenges related to regulation, business models, and user trust as the industry enters a phase of large-scale competition. For the first time, regulatory pressure is becoming a significant obstacle to Polymarket's global expansion. Recently, markets such as France, the Czech Republic, and South Korea have initiated reviews of Polymarket, with some regions even imposing bans. In the US market, Polymarket recently applied for a US futures license, hoping to re-expand its US business through a compliant path, but uncertainty remains. Secondly, brand trust issues have become a new challenge. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, Polymarket was accused of hiring paid content creators to record trading videos on fake websites and disseminating misleading "profit stories" through social media. Some of the high returns shown in these videos were questioned as not being genuine profits. More recently, Polymarket increased its sports market commission rate from 3% to 5%, while reducing the market maker rebate from 25% to 15%. Because this adjustment was not officially announced beforehand, but rather directly updated on the fee page and related documents, it sparked dissatisfaction among some users, especially sports traders and high-frequency traders. An even greater controversy stems from the POLY token. For a long time, some community users have anticipated the launch of a platform token by Polymarket, viewing airdrops as a significant reward for early participants. Previously, Polymarket had revealed plans to launch a token and conduct airdrops after resuming its US operations, and its parent company, Blockratize Inc., had also filed trademark registration applications for "POLY" and "$POLY," further reinforcing market expectations. However, recently, a former Polymarket team member stated that the official token will not be launched in the short term and may require a considerable wait. This news has further fueled community skepticism. Some users believe that Polymarket's token launch announcement helped attract early users and increase trading activity, but the delayed fulfillment has eroded community trust. From a capital perspective, the community believes that Polymarket's development direction may be gradually moving closer to traditional financial models. Since 2025, Polymarket has completed multiple rounds of large-scale equity financing, including a $2 billion strategic investment from ICE. Compared to crypto projects that rely on community incentives and token economics, Polymarket may be more inclined to realize its value through an IPO in the future. However, from a longer-term perspective, the competition in the prediction market is far from over. With more and more platforms such as Robinhood, Charles Schwab, and Hyperliquid entering this arena, the future prediction market will shift towards comprehensive competition in user access, regulatory capabilities, financial infrastructure, and ecosystem building. The World Cup has already decided its champion, but the new round of competition in the prediction market has only just begun.