From an election-year niche to a $45.33 billion month: Kalshi and Polymarket scaled roughly tenfold between 2025 and August 2026
Asked:
“How large is the prediction market industry in 2024-2026: Polymarket and Kalshi trading volumes, user counts, funding, and growth trends?”
This report draws on 41 sourced observations — 5 platform-wide volume, growth and user-count observations and 36 funding and valuation reports (deduplicated to 9 distinct financing events and talks) — published between April 2025 and October 2026, snapshot current through October 9, 2026. Volume means gross trading throughput in US dollars, not revenue; exact comparable annual 2024 platform totals were not established in the scanned sources.
Scale-up timeline: volume milestones and funding events, April 2025 – October 2026
Log scale, $ billions. Circles = trading volume milestones; squares = completed funding/valuation events; hollow squares = reported talks or commitments, not completed rounds. Hover any mark for detail and source.
August 2026, one month of trading volume
$ billions, gross monthly trading volume (Blask data via SCCG Management)
Combined Kalshi + Polymarket trading volume topped
$44B in calendar 2025; monthly volume on the pair swelled from $2B in early 2025 to nearly $50B by June 2025 —
predictionnews.comKalshi alone reportedly processed
$194B in 2026 through August 31, with sports at $146B (75%) of transactions —
inc.comBy late 2025 Kalshi's weekly volume exceeded
$1B — more than 1,000% above 2024, the only 2024 comparison the scanned sources establish —
reuters.comKalshi's reported valuation rose about
28x in 13 months, from $787M (April 2025) to $22B (May 2026), on roughly $2.52B of cumulative funding —
reuters.comAdoption numbers are large but measure different things: Kalshi added
3M new users during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, while Galaxy Research studied
2.9M Polymarket wallets (69.2% of retail accounts below break-even) — not comparable active-user counts —
finance.yahoo.com
Milestones, funding and adoption, in order
| Date | Company | Type | Observation | Source |
|---|
Method: 41 sourced observations across two result sets — 5 platform-wide volume/growth/user rows and 36 funding and valuation rows deduplicated by company and financing event, prioritizing Reuters and TechCrunch over aggregators (one inconsistent aggregator claim of a $20B June 2025 Kalshi valuation was discarded in favor of the corroborated $2B). Snapshot current through 2026-10-09. Volume figures are gross transaction/trading volume, not revenue or open interest; platform reporting conventions may not be perfectly comparable. User metrics count different populations (new signups vs. wallets studied). Hollow marks and "talks/commitment" labels denote proposed or phased deals, not completed financings; part of ICE's up-to-$2B Polymarket commitment was phased and included anticipated secondary purchases. Precise annual 2024 platform totals were not established in the scanned sources.