Prediction markets like Kalshi are monetizing reality & the gaming industry is pushing back | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

When Maduro fell, somebody cleaned up.

Somewhere around Dec. 27, an anonymous user placed a series of bets on Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction platform, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be out of office by Jan. 31, according to media reports.

The trader placed their large, final bets around 9:58 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 2—just one day before U.S. troops captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, during a large-scale military operation in Caracas codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve.

The anonymous user turned roughly $32,000–$34,000 in wagers into more than $400,000.

The massive payout also cranked up the volume on prediction markets, where individuals trade contracts based on the outcomes of future events such as election results or sports competitions.

Someone made over $400,000 betting on the fall of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Vargas/Getty Images

Kalshi & Polymarket: The two biggest players in prediction market betting

Polymarket and Kalshi are the two largest prediction market exchanges, Piper Sandler said, with volumes totaling nearly $4 billion from Jan. 13-19, up 9% from the previous week.

Saturday, Jan. 17, saw a new daily record of $799 million across the two platforms, the firm said, both of which are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

More economic analysis:

Sports betting is the biggest draw and most dominant force in prediction markets, and Piper Sandler said that it was another big week for NFL volumes, with three of the top five highest-volume games of the season on Kalshi.

NFL-related volumes on Kalshi totaled $661 million, down 8% week over week. The Jan. 20 NCAA Football championship game did $111 million in volume, making it the highest-volume game of the NCAAF season.

This month, volumes across Kalshi and Polymarket are on pace to reach $16.4 billion, a 38% increase month-over-month.

Piper Sandler said it anticipates the prediction market industry will see over 445 billion contracts traded in 2026, or $222.5 billion in notional volume—the total underlying value of the assets being traded—which is up from 95 billion in 2025 and 82% higher than the fourth quarter’s annualized run rate.

“We expect growth in both non-sport and sport-related contracts to be up over 70% from 4Q25’s annualized numbers,” the firm said.

The stock trading platform Robinhood Markets (HOOD) partnered with Kalshi to allow users to access prediction markets on college and professional football in August and recently announced it was enabling “Custom Combos” for users wagering on pro football.

Prediction markets’ rapid ascent into mainstream adoption

The company said that prediction markets have become Robinhood’s fastest-growing product line by revenue ever, with 11 billion contracts traded by more than 1 million customers.

In October, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which owns the New York Stock Exchange, said it will invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket. ICE will become a global distributor of Polymarket’s event-driven data, and both have agreed to partner on future tokenization initiatives.

“Buying shares is like betting on the outcome,” Polymarket says on its website. “Odds shift in real time as other traders bet. Fund your account with crypto, credit/debit card, or bank transfer—then you’re ready to bet. No bet limits and no fees.”

Currently, Polymarket has a trending bet on when Maduro’s mugshot will be released, with a total trading volume of $1.6 million at last check. There are several other categories on the site covering politics, sports, finance, technology, and culture, among other topics.

Meanwhile, over on Kalshi, which was founded in 2018 by two former students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the trending bets was what actor Will Smith would say during his Jan. 20 appearance on the Tonight Show.

Some of the top issues included travel, his upcoming National Geographic Series, Pole to Pole With Will Smith, while a Chris Rock–related prompt tied to the 2022 Oscars slapping incident came in dead last.

What are prediction markets? How & when did they become mainstream?

So, how did we get here?

Prediction markets date back to ancient times, when individuals would place wagers on harvests, Roman gladiatorial contests, and military campaigns.

In 1906, Francis Galton’s “wisdom of the crowd” observation grew out of a country fair where villagers guessed the weight of an ox. and Galton posited that the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals—-rather than that of a single expert—-tends to yield the best judgement.

The oldest online electronic prediction market was created by the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business in 1988, when the Iowa Electronic Markets went live and successfully used real-money futures trading to predict the U.S. presidential election.

“Interacting with the platform is a stark contrast to how modern prediction markets now alight screens with real-time trading activity as well as niche, social-media driven prompts,” the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania said in a 2025 report.

The 2024 Presidential Election, which saw Donald Trump return to the White House for a second, non-consecutive term, reached a peak of over $3 billion in trading volume on Polymarket alone.

“These providers streamline participation via ease in account setup as well as various attention-grabbing mechanisms, which further encourage trading,” the report said. “The ease of mainstream providers such as Kalshi and Polymarket accelerates the propensity to trade and therefore bolsters the influence of the platforms.”

In Las Vegas-style gambling, such as sportsbooks and casinos, players bet against the house with fixed payouts. Prediction markets work in a different way, which is why, for now, they are not regulated the same way as traditional gambling.

Are prediction markets the same as gambling? Legal issues & pushback

Unsurprisingly, the gaming industry is pushing back.

The American Gaming Association (AGA) and the Indian Gaming Association (IGA), the two largest U.S. gaming industry trade organizations, jointly called on Congress to take legislative action to ban “sports-event contracts” offered by unregulated prediction market platforms.

In a letter to members of the House and Senate, the gaming trade groups say that prediction market operators are capitalizing on inaction by the CFTC, resulting in harm to state gaming laws and tribal sovereignty, Casino.org reported.

The groups said Congress can leverage cryptocurrency legislation to better regulate prediction markets on a national scale.

The organizations charged that prediction markets are capitalizing on contracts linked to negative events, including assassinations and war, and those bets would never be allowed under state and tribal laws.