The World Cup is fast becoming a breakout moment for prediction markets — and crypto-adjacent trading platforms are at the center of that surge.
On Friday, Kalshi landed a high-profile partnership tie-in with ADI Predictstreet, a Gibraltar-licensed prediction market that signed a sponsorship deal with FIFA in April. The collaboration will push both brands into stadiums, TV broadcasts and online ads as the tournament moves into the knockout rounds, putting prediction markets directly in front of a global sports audience.
The exposure comes amid eye-popping market activity. Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz — an investor in Kalshi and Robinhood — reported in a blog post that weekly trading volume across prediction markets hit $14.5 billion for the first time last week. Outstanding bets also climbed to a record $1.6 billion, marking a third straight week of new highs. Those figures come from Artemis, the data set that tracks liquidity across platforms and includes Myriad, a prediction market owned by Dastan (the parent company of Decrypt).
Kalshi is capturing the lion’s share of sports betting flow: Artemis data showed Kalshi accounted for 62% of total trading volume last week, compared with 28% for Polymarket. Both platforms have been ramping up mainstream marketing — Polymarket ran ads featuring rapper Future, while Kalshi’s creative has highlighted athletes such as Croatia’s Luka Modrić.
Traditional sportsbook and gaming players are also jumping in. DraftKings announced a new prediction market called DKeX and said it expects its DraftKings Predictions offering to expand through the coming weeks, citing heightened World Cup interest.
Smaller and newer markets are seeing dramatic growth, too. Rothera — an exchange Robinhood began routing wagers to in late May — surged from weekly volumes of $2.1 million to $805 million, according to Artemis. That kind of acceleration underscores why some analysts see the World Cup as a turning point: Bernstein forecast the tournament could be a “watershed moment” for the sector, noting companies from Robinhood to Coinbase are using the event to rapidly grow their prediction-market products.
Bottom line: the World Cup’s global audience is driving record trading and fresh mainstream partnerships, helping prediction markets move from niche crypto experiment toward a mass-market financial product.
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