Polymarket และ Kalshi ครองปริมาณการซื้อขาย 97.5% ตลาดทำนายจะมีม้ามืดอีกหรือไม่?

Original Title: The State of Prediction Markets: 2026

Original Author: Jack Haldorsson

Original Translation: Peggy

Editor's Note: Prediction markets are evolving from niche crypto applications towards more mainstream financial and information markets.

The 2024 US presidential election brought Polymarket and Kalshi into the public eye. However, what truly changed the industry's narrative was that transaction volumes did not rapidly disappear after the election. Markets covering sports, technology, and economics absorbed the traffic, proving that the long-term demand for prediction markets does not stem solely from political events.

This article outlines the core landscape of prediction markets in 2026: a duopoly formed by Polymarket and Kalshi. The former leverages on-chain transactions, USDC settlement, and media distribution to expand its influence, while the latter, backed by CFTC compliance and channels like Robinhood, penetrates mainstream financial scenarios. Meanwhile, a new cohort of platforms seeks opportunities in short-cycle trading, sports predictions, media embedding, native on-chain metrics, and infrastructure layers.

More notably, competition in the prediction market space has transcended mere volume battles; it is now a comprehensive contest of liquidity, distribution capabilities, and regulatory pathways. Concurrently, issues like wash trading, statistical disputes over volume, expectations for token airdrops, and state-level regulatory pressures indicate that this sector remains highly uncertain.

Prediction markets are no longer just a DeFi experiment. They are becoming a new asset class at the intersection of financial trading, media content, and algorithmic strategies. Future breakout opportunities may not lie with generalized replicas, but with platforms possessing clear vertical focus and distribution advantages.

The following is the original text:

Two platforms, barely known to anyone in 2022, settled a notional trading volume last year that exceeded the GDP of New Zealand.

In 2025, the combined trading volume of Kalshi and Polymarket reached $44 billion. In May 2026, Kalshi raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation. The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, committed to investing $2 billion in Polymarket at a $9 billion valuation. AI agents now execute over 30% of on-chain trades. Meanwhile, a new wave of teams is building vertically specialized platforms on Base, Solana, Hyperliquid, and Arweave—all betting on the premise that the two giants cannot monopolize every category.

This might be the most comprehensive overview of the prediction market builder ecosystem available today.

The Numbers That Rewrote the Narrative

2024 was the year of validation for prediction markets. The single market for the US Presidential election generated $3.3 billion in volume for Polymarket. During the campaign season, virtually every major financial news desk began reporting on prediction market odds. Bloomberg, Politico, and FiveThirtyEight all cited these data in their analyses.

But what happened after November 5th surprised many: volumes did not revert to pre-election baselines. Sports markets absorbed the traffic.

By the end of 2025, sports markets accounted for 85% of Kalshi's volume and 39% of Polymarket's. Technology and science markets grew 1,637% year-over-year, while economic markets grew 905%. Political markets—the vertical widely assumed to be the core driver of prediction markets—grew only 43%.

Prediction markets found their long-term engine, and it wasn't elections.

The Duopoly Landscape

Polymarket runs on Polygon, settles in USDC, and strategically keeps most markets free of fees to prioritize building volume dominance. In October 2025, ICE made a $2 billion strategic investment at a post-money valuation of approximately $9 billion. In June 2025, X announced Polymarket as its official prediction market partner. In February 2026, Substack natively integrated Polymarket's live odds data; within weeks, one-fifth of Substack's top 250 revenue-generating publications were using it. The platform's CMO also confirmed that the POLY token and airdrop are imminent. Upon full functionality, its estimated annualized fee revenue is expected to exceed $200 million.

Kalshi, on the other hand, secured a Designated Contract Market license from the CFTC, becoming the first event contract platform to do so, and turned this compliance into a distribution moat. This very qualification allowed Kalshi to enter Robinhood. In 2025 alone, Robinhood facilitated over 4 billion event contract trades. In January 2025, Kalshi launched markets for the Super Bowl. Within less than 12 months, the share of sports in its volume surged from about 10% to over 85%. In May 2026, Kalshi completed a $1 billion funding round at a $22 billion valuation, led by Coatue with participation from Sequoia, a16z, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley, and ARK. At the time of the funding round, Kalshi had approximately 2 million monthly active users, an annualized trading volume of about $178 billion, and annualized revenue of roughly $1.5 billion.

In 2025, these two companies collectively controlled approximately 97.5% of the entire prediction market industry's volume.

Ecosystem Map

The Challengers

Beyond the duopoly, over a dozen teams are building new prediction market platforms, each targeting a specific gap.

@trylimitless deploys on Base, focusing on short-cycle markets including 15-minute, hourly, and daily markets for crypto and stock traders seeking quick settlement. It raised $10 million from 1confirmation, Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, DCG, Arrington, and others. In Q1 2026, its monthly volume reached $1.1 billion. Upon the launch of the $LMTS token, its fully diluted valuation briefly hit $800 million.

@MyriadMarkets operates on the Abstract chain and integrates Linea, Celo, and BNB. It bets on 'media-native' prediction markets. Its first distribution partnership occurred in December 2025, embedding prediction functionality into Trust Wallet. It now has over 430,000 users who have made over 1.7 million predictions. The project is founded by the team behind Decrypt and Rug Radio.

KASH, via @kash_bot, is embedded in X, allowing users to create and trade prediction markets within quote posts. In February 2026, KASH raised $2 million from Big Brain Holdings, Spartan, Coinbase Ventures, Animoca, Sui Foundation, and others. Its core thesis: whoever provides the shortest path to the scenario where users already reside wins the prediction market.

@DriftProtocol is built atop Drift Protocol's $500 million Solana liquidity pool. It supports over 30 collateral assets, allows cross-margin positions, and offers FUEL rewards.

@HedgehogMarket targets native on-chain metrics like Base fees, funding rates, and validator performance, while also offering generic binary options on Solana and Eclipse. It allows permissionless market creation and once peaked at a TVL of around $20 million.

@HyperliquidX's HIP-4 went live on May 2, 2026, co-designed with John Wang, head of Kalshi's crypto business. The mechanism is fully collateralized in USDH, uses a CLOB order book model, and charges no opening fees. The first market, deployed by Hyperliquid itself around BTC outcomes, saw $6 million in volume on day one. Currently, @Outcomexyz serves as the primary front-end for HIP-4, contributing over ten times the volume of any other interface.

@azuroprotocol functions more as infrastructure than a retail-facing front-end. It provides a sports prediction market layer for other teams using a Liquidity Tree design. It has raised $11 million from Delphi Digital, Gnosis, Arrington Capital, and others.

@Overtime_io operates on Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base. All protocol revenue flows back to $OVER token buybacks.

@RobinhoodApp, powered by Kalshi's backend, facilitated over 2 billion event contract trades in Q3 2025 alone.

The infrastructure layer is also heating up. In August 2025, @theclearingco raised a $15 million seed round from Union Square Ventures, Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Variant. Founded by former Polymarket and Kalshi executives, capital flowing into the clearing house layer typically signals an asset class maturing.

Core Drivers in 2026

Regulated platforms are seeking on-chain rails. Kalshi is tokenizing markets and deploying them on Solana, Polymarket is pursuing US CFTC compliance via the acquisition of QCEX, and Hyperliquid's HIP-4 was co-designed by Kalshi. These moves point in the same direction: a global liquidity layer at the base, with different regional regulatory shells layered on top.

AI agents have become an undeniable force in prediction market activity. According to analytics platform LayerHub, over 30% of wallets on Polymarket are running AI agents. Olas' Polystrat Agent executed over 4,200 trades in its first month, with a single position hitting a 376% return. Elastics also raised $2 million to build a natural language trading interface.

Whether or not platform teams initially designed for it, prediction markets are turning into venues for algorithmic trading.

Media platforms are treating prediction odds as high-engagement content. X's official partnership deal, Substack's native integration, and Google Finance displaying live odds all serve the same function: transforming financial questions into media events that invite shared discussion, thereby driving organic user acquisition.

Sports is the most persistent vertical. The 2024 US election brought in the first wave of users; sports retained them. Any platform raising funds in 2026 without a sports strategy is either building deep infrastructure or making a highly concentrated bet on a specific niche.

Real Challenges

Three risks are worth highlighting directly.

First, the volume metric itself is contested. An analysis by Paradigm in December 2025 noted that Polymarket's NegRisk architecture causes double-counting in most third-party data tracking tools. CertiK estimated that wash trading accounted for up to nearly 60% of Polymarket's peak volume in 2024. Therefore, the $44 billion figure is best viewed as a directional reference, not a rigorously audited data point.

Second, legal friction at the state level is real. As of January 2026, over 19 related federal lawsuits had been filed. In March 2026, Ohio ruled that Kalshi's sports products constituted gambling. Attorneys General in Wisconsin and Arizona have also taken action against the two major platforms respectively. The federal tailwind from the CFTC coexists with strong headwinds at the state level, and this tension is not likely to resolve quickly.

Third, token speculation is inflating platform activity. A significant portion of volume in 2025 and early 2026 was linked to market expectations for the POLY airdrop. Any platform publishing impressive volume figures without disclosing this context is misleading its readers.

Conclusion

In 2024, prediction markets completed the leap from 'an interesting DeFi experiment' to a financial asset class. By 2025, they began building institutional infrastructure: strategic investments from exchange parent companies, CFTC-related settlements, the Robinhood integration, and seed funding for the clearing layer.

Now in 2026, the real question this sector must answer is: besides Kalshi and Polymarket, who else has a chance to win?

The current answer is: teams that specialize in a vertical niche, possess a clear distribution advantage, and can find a path to regulatory protection or on-chain liquidity density.

The window for generalized replicas has closed. Beyond that, other avenues remain open.

If you are also building in this space and looking for the right growth architecture for your vertical, feel free to connect.

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