WASHINGTON, DC – Polymarket media on display at the launch of a pop-up experience shows data on the popularity of potential political candidates in Washington, DC on March 20, 2026 (Photo by Alex Kent/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Washington Post | Washington Post | Getty Images
The prediction markets that have propelled politics and sports to new heights over the past two years are betting that they will coalesce and become even more popular this fall.
In 2024, event contract exchanges became mainstream in transactions related to that year’s presidential election. And the start of the NFL season a year ago, in September 2025, marked the beginning of a surge in prediction market trading volume that has yet to slow down.
Prediction markets kicked off the new NFL season Wednesday night with the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks settling on a 2026 Super Bowl rematch. Labor Day is also the day political observers always consider the start of the midterm election campaign season.
Prediction markets are entering the fall this year at an unprecedented scale, with daily notional trading volumes now consistently reaching billions of dollars, and two powerful incumbent exchanges and a number of smaller exchanges chasing them for market share. And now, two events that separately brought prediction markets into the mainstream are happening simultaneously in just a few months.
“There’s a bit of a supercycle going on in prediction markets right now,” he said. Robin Hood’s JB Mackenzie, General Manager, Futures and Prediction Markets;
There are other events coming up this season, with traders focusing heavily on the hard-to-read economic contract related to the Federal Reserve’s potential cut in interest rates next week and the Major League Baseball playoffs, which will get underway in October.
Forecasting platforms are rushing to prepare for fall events. Seni Thomas, CEO of EDGE Markets, a financial technology company focused on sports betting and prediction markets, said this will continue as long as the market continues to derive the majority of its trading volume from sports products.
This season could be important, especially for new platforms. For many startups, “this NFL cycle is the real make-or-break key,” Thomas said.
veteran player
Polymarket on Tuesday debuted an ad featuring basketball icon LeBron James, former New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning and former Yankees forward Derek Jeter as part of its football season marketing campaign. It also announced new products for U.S. exchanges that allow users to converse, share and trade together on the platform.
Carsi announced the ability for speculators who participated in the 2025 NFL season market, which recorded $2.3 billion in trading volume on Saturday, the first day of college football, to track their performance before kickoff of this season. The company is also expanding its partnerships with individual sports teams in preparation for the MLB playoff season.
Once the college football game started, both platforms experienced glitches. Polymarket’s U.S. platform was down for much of Saturday, and accounts that suffered losses due to the outage were eventually refunded. Calci settled the market early on the University of Michigan game and paid traders as if underdog Western Michigan had pulled off the upset. Carsi then fixed Michigan’s results and paid accordingly.
The platform is leaning toward sports, even as it battles in court with states across the country who argue that sports-related event contracts amount to gambling and should be subject to regulators rather than Wall Street watchdog the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
“We operate in compliance with CFTC regulations and will continue to do so, and we will continue to work with our stakeholders to operate a safe and reliable product,” Ari Borod, Polymarket’s president of sports business development, said in August before announcing the partnership with the New York Yankees.
new entrant
The two largest prediction market platforms are looking to build on their previous NFL successes, while others are also looking to capitalize on the same sporting events.
One of them is Rothera, a prediction market platform developed in a joint venture between Susquehanna International Group and Robinhood. Trading volumes soared over the summer after going online in time for the FIFA World Cup.
“Expanding all these sports is a huge step forward,” CEO Thomas Tsipas said. “We just started going live the last week of May…We’re proceeding as carefully as possible, as quickly as possible.”
Novig, a platform that only lists sporting event contracts, launched an NFL marketing campaign Wednesday with an ad featuring actress Sydney Sweeney, one of the first celebrities to partner with a small exchange.
ProphetX, which launched in June to focus on sports-related event contracts, has also been preparing for the fall by revamping its consumer platform and focusing on increasing liquidity during the NFL season.
“Our revenue doubled from June to August,” ProphetX co-founder and CEO Dean Sisun said in an interview. “We want to be four to five times by the end of the year on a run rate basis…We really believe we can do that.”
A Kalsi billboard showing odds for the 2024 U.S. presidential election is located across from the Nasdaq Market site in New York, U.S., on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
medium term opportunity
While ProphetX features sporting event contracts, Sisun said the platform also plans to launch a market related to the midterm elections.
Robinhood is introducing Rothera’s election-related contracts to users of its brokerage.
Heading into November, Carsi launched several tools to provide users with data on political races across the country, including a July midterm election hub. Benjamin Freeman, Calci’s head of political growth, said the organization is working toward holding in-person events leading up to election night, as well as considering the best way for traders and viewers to see how the odds are changing across races as the results roll in.
Unlike in 2024, when contracting for election-related events wasn’t legal in the U.S. until a month before the presidential vote, in 2026, “we have a much longer road to planning,” said Benjamin Freeman, director of political growth at Kalsi.
The midterm elections are also an opportunity to remind the public that the platform is more than just sports, even though the majority of trading volume still comes from these contests.
“There’s probably going to be a lot of talk about the NFL this week,” said Robinhood’s McKenzie. “But I think that’s what’s interesting about prediction markets. They evolve based on what people want to trade and what’s in the news cycle.”
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalsi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and minority ownership.
