The top brass at Robinhood couldn’t wait another moment. Shayne Coplan, the 26-year-old CEO of crypto-based prediction market Polymarket, had just teased a much-anticipated return to the United States for his futures-trading platform on the eve of Thanksgiving. Officials at Robinhood fired back on social media, announcing on X only hours later that its app, best known for stock trading, would soon be aggressively expanding its services into the prediction business by partnering with Kalshi, Polymarket’s main rival.
Robinhood Chief Brokerage Officer Steve dubbed prediction markets “the fastest-growing business we’ve ever had” in a November appearance on CNBC after the announcement.
And the numbers back it up. “We’re doing $40 billion of annualized volume now,” boasted Tarek Mansour, the MIT math nerd who co-founded Kalshi with his fellow MIT math nerd Luana Lopes Lara in July of 2021. “Last year at the same time period, right before we got the election approval, we were at $300 million of annualized volume. We’re at $40 billion now. And it’s growing like 20 percent week over week.”
These days, often your best bet to learn about what’s coming next, from hot-button political topics to shifts in cultural trends, is to check in with the round-the-clock traders on Polymarket and Kalshi. On the two foremost major prediction market websites, people bet real money nonstop on real-world events. Though both platforms have been operable for the better part of half a decade, it’s been the later stage of this year that has witnessed unmistakable growth in volume and name recognition for both. So much so that the two platforms are suddenly signing major deals with global tech and financial leaders amid their rise as the latest darlings of the internet these final months of 2025.
When the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Washington, DC a week before the Thanksgiving holiday, he surprised everyone when, speaking before luminaries at the White House formal dinner, he joked about disappointing eager traders online who were watching and wagering on whether or not his highness would wear a tuxedo. MBS, who showed up in traditional garb, smiled and spoke simply with a laugh: “Sorry, you lose the bet.” It was just the latest confirmation that prediction markets such as Kalshi are having their moment.
Kalshi is not alone in its staggering growth numbers. Polymarket, its major competitor, is also reporting eye-watering sums of trading volume with certain single event markets attracting more than $10–20 million in wagers alone. But what exactly differentiates these prediction markets from the run-of-the-mill sportsbooks that have been operational in the United States since the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting in May of 2018?
First, prediction markets match traders against each other, whereas sportsbooks act as the oddsmakers willing to risk monetary exposure when taking a customer’s bet. Prediction market platforms offer the opportunity to bet on sports in addition to bidding on an array of daily events, such as bin Salman’s sartorial choices. In fact, it’s the markets beyond sports that have suddenly propelled prediction markets past the sportsbooks.
Got a hunch on Israel’s next bombing campaign of Gaza? Polymarket is the place to lay that wager. Noticing a shift in the social media posting habits of Tesla CEO Elon Musk? On Polymarket, users can gamble on the number of times Musk posts on X in any given week. Feeling a chill in the air and interested in playing weatherman for the afternoon? Kalshi offers futures betting that resolves depending on the blustery nature of a random day in New York City in late October. And so and so forth. If you’ve got a knack for what’s coming next, be it the amount of times Trump utters “autopen” in a press briefing or the Fed’s rate-cut decision in December, prediction platforms are working to create a market for that.
The founders of Kalshi first generated the idea to create a site that allowed for such unusual markets following the late-breaking and surprising results of Brexit in 2016. Mansour, who early in his career worked for financial institutions Goldman Sachs and Citadel, noticed that analysts, investors, traders, and common folk alike struggled to hedge their investments in the chaotic moments following the referendum.
In their struggles, Mansour arrived at a solution. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Mansour has said he spoke with dozens of lawyers who argued that others before him had attempted to create similar trading platforms “since the ’80s” but had been hampered by regulatory hurdles every time. But the late 2010s saw a much different regulatory climate in the U.S. Sports betting, which had largely been contained to Las Vegas and the smoke-filled backrooms of pool halls across the U.S., had been given the go-ahead. Now the genie was firmly out of the bottle.
Though both Kalshi and Polymarket boast the ability to trade markets as diverse as economic outcomes and sporting news, the logistics of each site and their paths to success have looked quite different. Kalshi is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) as a designated contract market, a distinction the company earned in November 2020. The platform requires its users to identify through a process called Know Your Customer (KYC), and all deposits and withdrawals are processed through traditional fiat measures such as ACH and wire transfers.
Polymarket, on the other hand, uses blockchain technology to process transactions and does not require, as of yet, a KYC process requiring users to submit identification. That’s partially owed to its cryptocurrency infrastructure and partially due to the fact that users based in the United States are not yet allowed to trade on Polymarket. To access the site, American traders must use a VPN (virtual private network) to mask their location.
That hurdle could evaporate any day now, based on Coplan’s bullish pre-Thanksgiving remarks. And he’s got good reason to be confident. In July, Polymarket acquired the derivatives exchange QCX for $112 million, a step necessary if the platform wished to return stateside. But it hasn’t always been an easy working relationship between officials at the CFTC and Polymarket. In January 2022, the commission required Polymarket to pay a $1.4 million civil monetary penalty for “operating an illegal unregistered or non-designated facility for event-based binary options online trading contracts.”
And it isn’t just the CFTC that has been hot on Polymarket’s trail. During the early morning hours of November 12, 2024, only eight days after the U.S. presidential election, Coplan’s Manhattan residence was raided by the FBI. Department of Justice officials said it was merely investigating whether Polymarket allowed U.S.-based traders to use the site. But Coplan, who has been photographed with Donald Trump Jr., claimed the raid was “obvious political retribution” from the Biden administration for correctly predicting the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
“Discouraging that the current administration would seek a last-ditch effort to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents,” Coplan stated at the time.
Polymarket’s surge in volume and visibility has coincided with Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Trump, who frames himself as the most pro-crypto president in U.S. history, has promised to roll back the sort of regulations that have particularly stymied the crypto-based betting platform’s advance into the American market. To cap off an impressive few months, Polymarket announced on X the Monday before Thanksgiving that the platform had “received CFTC approval for intermediation, paving the way for seamless access to polymarkets through registered brokers & financial institutions.” By the afternoon adverts were spotted on the streets of New York City promoting Polymarket as the place where “you can now trade American money in America.”
“This admin and commission are built different,” wrote Coplan in a post praising the Trump administration. “The pace, thorough feedback on applications, working through weekends – unprecedented. Bravo Caroline Pham and team.” Pham is the Biden-appointed, Trump-designated commissioner of the CFTC who signed off on Polymarket’s return to American shores.
“People rely on Polymarket because we provide clarity where there is confusion,” Coplan added in a press release following the CFTC’s announcement.
After a year of unbridled success for both platforms, some of the biggest names in sports, tech, and media are now lining up for a chance to work with Polymarket and Kalshi. Musk’s X recently named Polymarket its official prediction market partner. That news followed deals announced with Yahoo Finance, the Ultimate Fighting Competition (UFC), the sports-betting app Prizepicks, and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, in addition to its new relationship with Robinhood, Kalshi has announced partnerships with the National Hockey League and Coinbase, among others.
And it’s not just partnerships that are rushing in. Kalshi and Polymarket are raising big money through funding rounds led by some of the most noteworthy names in tech and finance. In June, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led a $200 million funding round for Polymarket, valuing the startup at more than $1 billion dollars. Only five months later, Polymarket is again seeking to raise money at a valuation between $12 billion and $15 billion. Kalshi is also looking to raise money at a valuation of $10 billion, which is more than double the valuation it sought in a financing round announced only weeks ago.
All the new money and energy engulfing the industry signals that it is a great time to be in the prediction market business. Researchers at the American Gaming Association who recently queried 2,001 registered voters aged 21 and over found that 57 percent of Americans had participated in some form of gambling in 2025, the highest numbers ever recorded. Those figures are driving new bets on the industry and its platforms. Just this week, a San Francisco–based prediction market called The Clearing Co. applied for its own CFTC license and announced it has raised $15 million from backers including Coinbase Ventures. And Enlivex, a Nasdaq-listed biopharma company, announced this week it will acquire $212 million of Rain, the native cryptocurrency token of the Rain Protocol, a crypto-based prediction market launched on the Arbitrum blockchain in 2023. It’s a classic gold rush with no end in sight at present.
The question now is how much is a moment of hype, rather than a new standard that could challenge the traditional norms of futures trading. Are prediction markets here to stay or are they merely a passing fad, driven to great heights by the newness of their eclectic offerings? In contrast to the excitement surrounding prediction markets, the stock price for DraftKings, a leader among sports-betting platforms, has fallen more than 24 percent this year, due in part to competition from a number of other regulated companies such as FanDuel, BetMGM, and Fanatics. Will Polymarket and Kalshi suffer similar fates as more and newer prediction market platforms take shape? And can these platforms fundamentally change the way betting operates in America, or are they simply benefiting from being the latest new toys on the shelf? Only time will tell. But what cannot be denied is that the year of 2025 has been the year of prediction markets.
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