Authors: flowie, ChainCatcher

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is becoming one of the largest traffic events in the history of prediction markets. Bernstein calls it an important "watershed" for the industry, expecting that the event will bring 5 to 10 billion USD in new trading volume.

However, more noteworthy than the increase in trading volume is that the competitive logic of prediction markets seems to be changing.

In recent years, the focus of market discussions has been, Polymarket and Kalshi, and who will be the ultimate winner in the era of prediction markets.

However, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour recently provided a thought-provoking answer in an interview with Front Office Sports.

In his view, Polymarket is not its main competitor. The real competitors to watch out for are CME Group, Robinhood and DraftKings.

At the same time, Bernstein also believes that platforms like Robinhood and DraftKings that have user access and distribution channels will become important beneficiaries of this World Cup.

This means that, as traditional brokers and exchanges collectively step back, the competitive logic of prediction markets is being redefined.

Threat from Traditional Trading Giants

If the prediction market has been an independent track in recent years, then in the past year, a significant change is that more traditional financial platforms are beginning to incorporate prediction markets as part of their existing business.

Among them, the most aggressive action has been taken by the internet broker Robinhood. Robinhood has not only launched the Prediction Markets Hub, but also, based on its collaboration with Kalshi, further integrated its own regulated exchange Rothera, which is regulated by the CFTC, officially incorporating event contracts into its platform system. Users do not need to download a new app, they can directly trade the World Cup, Federal Reserve interest rates, economic data, and even political events from their existing accounts.

For Robinhood, prediction markets have become one of the fastest-growing business lines. In 2025, the total number of event contracts traded on the Robinhood platform reached over 12 billion, and by May 2026, this number had reached approximately 16 billion. In the first quarter of this year, the company achieved 8.8 billion in event contract trades, driving a 320% year-on-year increase in "other trading income," reaching 147 million USD.

The World Cup further serves as an important catalyst for this business. In early June, Robinhood officially launched its World Cup prediction market service, employing its proprietary prediction market product Rothera. Following the announcement, the company's stock price rose more than 5% in a single day.

Bernstein expects that in 2026, Robinhood will reach approximately 586 million USD in prediction market revenue, a year-on-year increase of about 286%, with the proportion of trading income reaching double digits and expected to become one of the largest drivers of new revenue for the company.

In addition to Robinhood, over the past year, traditional exchanges and sports betting platforms have also accelerated their layout in the prediction market.

In May of this year, Interactive Brokers (IBKR) integrated event contracts from Kalshi, CME Group and ForecastEx into a unified account system. Users can participate in prediction market trading for economic data, political events, and some sports events while trading stocks, options, and futures, achieving unified access and price comparison across different platforms.

As one of the largest derivatives exchanges in the world, CME Group has also started entering this market through event contracts. In 2025, CME reached a partnership with sports betting giant FanDuel and launched the prediction market platform FanDuel Predicts at the end of the same year, hoping to leverage the latter's large user base to promote event contracts to a wider retail market.

On the other hand, DraftKings also officially launched its independent product DraftKings Predictions at the end of 2025, venturing into the prediction market regulated by the CFTC, attempting to extend its existing sports betting users to event contract trading and gradually cover more categories such as sports, finance, and entertainment.

Meanwhile, Webull has also integrated with Kalshi's event contract service. More and more traditional brokers, exchanges, and betting platforms are beginning to see prediction markets as part of their existing trading ecosystem, rather than as an independent new track.

This means that prediction markets are gradually evolving from a standalone product into a functional module within brokers, exchanges, and betting platforms. Users no longer need to download a separate prediction market App. They might just open Robinhood to buy stocks while predicting the World Cup champion; open FanDuel or DraftKings to participate in sports betting while trading an event contract; or configure assets at Interactive Brokers while placing a bet on the next Federal Reserve rate cut.

For these platforms, prediction markets are not their core business, but they can leverage existing account systems, capital systems, and user bases to expand at extremely low marginal costs. This is also leading to a change in the competitive boundaries of prediction markets.

How will Prediction Markets Step Out of the Shadow of the "Giants"?

As traditional trading giants start to "incorporate prediction markets into their systems," the question that arises is, what space is left for prediction markets themselves?

Currently, the evolution of the industry has not led to a singular "breakthrough," but has branched out into multiple pathways.

The first pathway is to continually expand the range of trading categories. Initially, the core assets of prediction markets primarily revolved around elections and political events. Gradually, sports events, economic data, interest rate decisions, entertainment events, etc., have become new sources of growth. This year’s World Cup is referred to as the industry's "watershed moment" by Bernstein, largely because sports events are expected to help prediction markets break away from dependence on election cycles and enter more mainstream consumer scenarios.

At the same time, prediction markets are also beginning to break through trading boundaries, attempting to extend into a broader trading market. For example, both Polymarket and Kalshi have started exploring perpetual contracts and derivatives this year, hoping to meet users' continuous trading demands and reduce the impact of singular event cycles.

However, compared to the expansion of asset categories, another change may be more noteworthy.

The second pathway is to extend towards infrastructure and distribution layers.

In the past few years, the market had viewed Kalshi and Polymarket as direct competitors. However, starting in the second half of 2025, the development paths of the two began to diverge. According to data from Bernstein cited by The Block, as of May 2026, Kalshi's monthly trading volume reached 17.9 billion USD, accounting for about 57% of the market share, while Polymarket's monthly trading volume dropped to about 7.1 billion USD. Kalshi has achieved a lead in trading volume and market share.

This kind of turnaround is driven not only by regulatory advantages but also by the expansion of differentiated channels. Traditional trading platforms represented by Robinhood, Coinbase, Webull, Interactive Brokers , have gradually introduced their event contract capabilities, becoming cross-platform "event liquidity providers," bringing enormous traffic.

However, the issue arises that this previously successful pathway is undergoing a significant loosening, where the distributors begin to absorb infrastructure capabilities, no longer satisfied with profit sharing, but rather building their products. The aforementioned Robinhood is an example; it not only integrates with Kalshi, but also starts to build its own prediction market system through Rothera and other means. This indicates that as more distribution platforms can directly engage with underlying users, the value boundary of the "infrastructure provider" begins to become unstable.

Competition between prediction market platforms is transitioning from merely vying for end users to gradually extending to compete for channels, liquidity, and underlying capabilities.

This competitive scenario is not unfamiliar in the internet era. For example, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, competing within the video conferencing scene.

Zoom once defined the video conferencing category with an ultimate professional experience, but Microsoft and Google leveraged deep integration with Office 365 and Gmail to turn Teams and Meet into "tabs within collaboration suites," compressing video calls from "independent downloaded App."

The outcome of this competition is not that Teams replaces Zoom, but rather that entry-type platforms, leveraging distribution advantages, continue to expand their coverage and, to some extent, rewrite the growth boundaries of the product. Zoom still exists, but it is forced to shift toward enterprise collaboration, AI and workflow capabilities, etc., to hedge against the growth squeeze after entry was embedded.

Prediction markets are currently at a similar historical crossroads. Whether Kalshi and Polymarket can step out of the shadow of the giants remains to be seen.

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