Prediction market operators had a successful World Cup, with Kalshi telling CNBC it had added 3 million new users during the tournament, while data from market analyst firm H2 Gambling Capital showed the platforms accounted for an estimated 27% of all U.S. sports betting activity throughout the event.
Key Takeaways
- Kalshi added roughly three million users as World Cup trading surged, capped by a record $1.2 billion market.
- Prediction markets captured about 27% of legal U.S. World Cup betting volume, tripling their January share.
- Kalshi outpaced DraftKings and FanDuel in daily app users, forcing sportsbooks to reassess the competitive threat.
While Kalshi pulled in new users for the World Cup, its market that allowed users to trade on who they thought would be the eventual champion of the tournament generated over $1.2 billion in trading volume, the biggest total ever recorded for a single market on the platform.
A marketing professor at Northwestern University pointed to the globalization of soccer as the reason the tournament gave Kalshi such a wide pool of potential users, arguing that few other events offer a comparable addressable market. Kalshi backed up that growth with a stadium branding partnership, an OpenAI tie-in that surfaced its odds inside ChatGPT, and a run of athlete endorsement deals.
On top of this, Bloomberg reporting puts that growth in a wider context. Citing estimates from H2 Gambling Capital, the outlet found that prediction markets accounted for around 27% of all legal U.S. sports betting volume tied to the World Cup, up from roughly 9% at the start of the year.
Kalshi repeatedly broke its own trading records throughout the tournament, at one point running nearly 10 times the pace it had earlier in the year. The report noted that Kalshi's app pulled more daily users than either DraftKings or FanDuel during the event.
Executives at traditional sportsbooks who once dismissed these platforms as a regulatory footnote are now facing a competitor that used the tournament to establish itself as a mainstream alternative to the sportsbook model.
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Home team's early exit still delivers for sportsbooks
Even as prediction markets carved out a bigger share of the action, traditional sportsbooks had a tournament to remember in their own right. ESPN reported that the USA's World Cup performance set records for domestic betting operators. The loss to Belgium in the round of 16 was the most-bet soccer match in the history of several major books.
BetMGM said the game drew more betting activity than any 2026 College Football Playoff matchup outside the championship, the men's college basketball final, or any title-clinching game in the NBA, NHL, or MLB.
Bettors leaned heavily toward the Americans throughout the tournament rather than spreading their action evenly. Caesars Sportsbook reported that 81% of the money in its U.S. advancing market was placed on the home team, with additional volume tied to forward Folarin Balogun scoring.
BetMGM's senior trading manager pointed to the excitement of hosting the tournament and the primetime kickoff slot as key drivers of the surge in betting activity. Because the U.S. entered as a modest favorite against Belgium, the lopsided backing turned the eventual loss into one of the more profitable outcomes of the year for sportsbooks, closing out the host nation's run with a clear financial win for the operators taking the bets.
