Prediction markets have long outgrown their origins as a niche experiment in collective forecasting. Today, they represent a distinct market infrastructure where future events are turned into tradable contracts, and participants’ expectations are reflected in continuously changing market prices. Despite their outward similarities, these platforms differ in important ways. They operate under different legal frameworks, rely on different liquidity models, use different mechanisms to determine outcomes, and offer varying levels of user protection.
Prediction markets are best evaluated in the context of how they’re structured and what they’re designed to do. Key considerations include who operates the market and provides access to it, how prices are formed, how liquid the market is, which rules govern outcome resolution, and what regulatory constraints apply. Together, these factors affect the reliability of the market signal, whether it can be used as a reflection of collective expectations, and the practical value of a given platform.
This overview focuses on the largest platforms and projects representing different market models, including a regulated exchange, a brokerage model, a blockchain-based prediction market, and specialized short-term event contracts.
Centralized Prediction Markets
Today’s prediction market landscape can be broadly divided into regulated centralized exchanges, including brokers that provide access to them, and decentralized platforms built on blockchain technology. We’ll begin with regulated centralized platforms, which account for the largest share of the industry’s reported trading volume.
Kalshi
Kalshi is the largest regulated event-contracts exchange in the U.S., operating under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The platform lists contracts on election outcomes, central bank decisions, inflation data, weather events, sporting events, and cultural awards. Trading takes place through a central limit order book, contracts are settled in U.S. dollars, and all users must complete identity verification.
Kalshi’s primary strength lies in combining a broad range of markets with regulated market infrastructure. According to the company, by May 2026, its annualized trading volume, based on its current run rate, increased from $52 billion to $178 billion, while institutional trading volume rose 9-fold over 6 months. These figures shouldn’t be viewed as an independent assessment. They do, however, illustrate the platform’s rapid transition from a retail-focused product to infrastructure used by professional market participants.
The platform’s main constraint is its reliance on the U.S. regulatory framework. The issue was particularly acute for sports event contracts. The CFTC classifies them as federally regulated financial derivatives, while authorities in several states have sought to apply state gambling laws.
ForecastEx
ForecastEx, part of Interactive Brokers Group, is registered with the CFTC as both a designated contract market and a derivatives clearing organization. Its product offering is considerably narrower, focusing on interest rates, inflation, economic indicators, climate-related events, and select political developments. Contracts are integrated directly into a standard brokerage account, allowing investors to compare implied probabilities with positions in bonds, currencies, or options, and use them to hedge specific risks.
In 2026, Interactive Brokers integrated access to ForecastEx, Kalshi, and CME Group into a single interface that selected the best available price. This architecture integrates event contracts into a broader investment interface as another exchange-traded asset class. The tradeoff is a relatively limited selection of mainstream events, although integration with a traditional investment portfolio is stronger than on specialized prediction market platforms.
Robinhood
Robinhood should be viewed primarily as an intermediary that provides users with access to event contracts, rather than as an exchange that lists all of the instruments available on its platform. The company introduced its prediction markets section in March 2025, initially offering contracts tied to Federal Reserve decisions and the outcomes of the NCAA basketball tournaments. It later expanded the lineup to include politics, economics, sports, and culture.
Robinhood’s key advantages are its existing customer base and a familiar interface for retail investors. According to the company’s second quarter 2026 earnings report, users traded 13.6 billion contracts through the platform, up from 8.8 billion in the first quarter. This figure counts contracts bought and sold, each worth $1 at settlement. It doesn’t represent dollar-denominated trading volume, so it can’t be compared directly with the volumes reported by Kalshi or Polymarket.
Decentralized Prediction Markets
A defining feature of this segment is its use of blockchain technology. However, the degree of decentralization varies across platforms. Position records and settlement may rely on distributed ledgers and smart contracts, while user interfaces, market access, market creation, and dispute resolution are often controlled by specific organizations or communities of token holders.
Polymarket
Polymarket is the largest blockchain-based prediction market. Orders are matched through a hybrid system, positions are recorded on the Polygon network, and contracts are collateralized with the USDC stablecoin. An outcome is initially proposed by a participant who posts a bond. If challenged, the dispute is resolved through the UMA protocol and, in certain cases, by a vote of token holders. Once settlement is finalized, the outcome can’t be revised.
The platform remains the sector’s market leader thanks to the breadth of markets it offers and the liquidity of its largest contracts. At the same time, the transparency of blockchain records doesn’t eliminate reliance on how a market is worded, which source is designated for outcome verification, or how disputes are resolved. In addition, access to the platform is restricted in certain jurisdictions, and liquidity on the most popular markets far exceeds that of niche contracts.
Limitless
Limitless specializes in short-term price forecasts for cryptocurrencies and stocks. Built on Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, the platform continuously lists 5-minute, hourly, and daily contracts on BTC, ETH, XRP, and SOL. Each pair of outcomes is fully collateralized with USDC, and the combined value of the two contracts is fixed at $1.
According to the platform’s internal documents, cumulative trading volume has exceeded $1 billion. Limitless appeals to active traders by allowing them to speculate on price movements without owning the underlying asset. Its main vulnerability stems from the short settlement window. As the outcome determination approaches, the cost of temporarily influencing the underlying price may decline.
Myriad
Myriad uses a hybrid model in which users sign orders with their private keys before they’re matched on the platform’s proprietary server. Final settlement is then executed through a smart contract on BNB Smart Chain. The platform embeds prediction markets into news and community products, making forecasts part of how users consume information. Most contracts are collateralized with the USD1 and USDT stablecoins.
Myriad’s distinguishing feature is its distribution model. Prediction markets can be embedded directly into news and community platforms, allowing users to interact with forecasts within the context of the related article or discussion. At the same time, Myriad remains significantly smaller than the industry’s leading platforms. At the time of writing, one of its largest markets, a forecast on oil prices, had attracted around $11.6 million in trading volume.
Overall Size of the Prediction Market Sector
In July 2026, combined trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket surpassed a record $50 billion, according to The Block. Polymarket accounted for about $12.9 billion of that total, including $7.9 billion on its main platform and another $5 billion on Polymarket US, its regulated U.S. platform.
Estimating the overall size of the global prediction market remains difficult because there is no unified registry of platforms or standardized reporting methodology. Some centralized platforms don’t disclose trading volumes, while analytics providers use different approaches to account for contract notional value, secondary trading, and affiliated platforms.
It’s also important to note that some centralized prediction markets fall under different regulatory classifications. Large platforms such as U.K.-based Betfair Exchange and Smarkets use centralized operations and market-based price discovery, allowing users to trade the outcomes of sporting, political, and other events with one another. Both platforms operate under licenses issued by the U.K. Gambling Commission (UKGC) and are therefore legally classified as betting exchanges rather than markets for financial event contracts.
Meanwhile, the overall size of the decentralized segment can be estimated roughly. According to DefiLlama, which tracks more than 100 blockchain-based prediction market platforms, trading volume across the sector reached about $17.5 billion in July 2026.
Major Prediction Market Events and Outcomes
The scale and informational value of prediction markets are best illustrated through specific events. The largest examples include:
- The 2024 U.S. presidential election. Settlement rules relied on calls from the Associated Press, Fox News, and NBC. However, Polymarket’s market, which generated $3.69 billion in trading volume, became a widely cited source of real-time information for news organizations. The event ranked among the largest prediction markets by volume. It also demonstrated how a liquid market could rapidly incorporate debates, polling data, and changes in the candidate field, while highlighting the influence that a small number of large participants could have on market prices.
- Federal Reserve policy decisions. Research by Federal Reserve staff found that Kalshi’s probability distributions provide a detailed, high-frequency forecast of policy outcomes. Ahead of the July 2025 meeting, the implied probability of a rate cut rose to about 25% following remarks by Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, before falling after a stronger-than-expected employment report. Kalshi’s median and most likely forecasts have correctly anticipated every policy decision 1 day before each meeting since 2022. At longer forecasting horizons, their accuracy was comparable to surveys of professional economists.
- Bitcoin price levels. Polymarket’s “What price will Bitcoin reach in 2025?” market attracted about $188.8 million in trading volume. Settlement depended exclusively on the highest 1-minute candle recorded for the BTCUSDT trading pair on Binance. As a result, participants were effectively forecasting a specific market observation on a particular exchange rather than Bitcoin’s broader market price. For contracts of this type, the choice of exchange, observation window, and outage-handling rules matters more than the asset’s overall price direction.
- The 2026 FIFA World Cup. Polymarket’s tournament winner market reached about $4.3 billion in trading volume, while related contracts on Kalshi generated around $1.89 billion. These figures shouldn’t be added together or compared directly because the platforms use different methodologies to account for trades, individual outcomes, and secondary trading activity. Even so, the scale of activity confirmed that sports became one of the largest sources of liquidity for prediction markets and a central point of tension between derivatives regulation and gambling laws.
According to Chainalysis, prediction markets related to the 2026 FIFA World Cup generated about $20 billion in on-chain trading volume, including $5.7 billion during the tournament’s 5-week run. Nearly 400,000 wallets interacted with these platforms. During the tournament, football-related contracts accounted for about 63% of total blockchain prediction market volume. Daily trading volume climbed to $250 million after matches began and exceeded $300 million on the day of the final. Activity was global, with the largest flows originating from the U.S. and China, followed by Canada, Thailand, and the U.K.
Market Manipulation, Insider Trading, and Disputed Settlements
As trading volumes increased, prediction markets became more attractive to participants with access to nonpublic information. In 2025, Kalshi fined a candidate $2,246 for trading contracts tied to his own nomination and barred him from trading event contracts for 5 years. A YouTube editor who allegedly traded using advance knowledge of upcoming video content received a $20,398 fine and a 2-year suspension. The CFTC published both enforcement actions as a warning that anti-fraud and insider trading rules apply in full to event contracts.
In May 2026, the CFTC brought charges against a Google employee who, according to the agency, used nonpublic information about the company’s annual search trends ranking to earn about $1.2 million trading contracts on Polymarket. The case signaled that the CFTC considers prohibitions on trading based on material nonpublic information to apply to event contracts traded on blockchain-based platforms as well.
Another issue is the reliability of reported trading volume. Researchers at Columbia Business School estimated that wash trading accounted for about 25% of the Polymarket activity included in their sample. This is an academic estimate rather than a regulatory finding. Even so, it illustrates why trading volume should be evaluated alongside open interest, the number of independent participants, and position concentration.
In a separate study, a group of researchers identified spikes in order activity in the underlying market immediately before the settlement of 5-minute Bitcoin contracts. The authors concluded that this activity had a manipulative effect on price formation in the underlying asset.
Regulatory Challenges and the Future of Prediction Markets
Regulation will play a major role in shaping the next stage of development for prediction markets. In June 2026, the CFTC proposed a special review process for contracts linked to sports and gaming, war, terrorism, assassination, and unlawful activity. These products would be subject to a preliminary review lasting up to 90 days. A jurisdictional dispute is also continuing. The federal regulator maintains that it has exclusive authority over exchange-traded event contracts, while several states view sports markets as a form of betting.
The European Union has no unified framework specifically designed for prediction markets. In July 2026, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) clarified that event contracts classified as financial instruments under MiFID II are subject to national restrictions on binary options. Their marketing and sale to retail clients are prohibited, while services provided to professional participants require the appropriate license. Contracts that don’t qualify as financial instruments may fall under MiCA or national gambling laws. Meanwhile, the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has maintained a permanent ban on the sale of binary options to retail clients since 2019.
Based on current trends, prediction markets are likely to develop in 3 main directions over the foreseeable future:
- Integration into brokerage apps. Users will be able to select event contracts alongside bonds, options, and funds.
- Hybrid infrastructure. Blockchain technology will be used for settlement and outcome recording, while licensed operators will manage customer access, market creation, and abuse prevention.
- Specialization. Macroeconomic, weather, commodity, and other specialized contracts will develop as hedging instruments, while political and sports markets will face the strictest regulatory constraints.
The outlines of the future prediction market are already visible in the platforms discussed in this article. Kalshi and ForecastEx are pursuing a regulated exchange model. ForecastEx and Robinhood are focusing on brokerage integration and broad distribution. Polymarket is building around global liquidity and blockchain transparency, while Limitless and Myriad are developing specialized formats. The platforms most likely to dominate will be those that combine deep liquidity with legally enforceable rules and clear accountability for final settlement.
