Fed rate cuts. Bitcoin price action. Who takes home the Oscar. The next world leader to get ousted. In 2026, all of these are tradeable assets — and millions of people are treating them that way.
Prediction markets pulled in $44 billion in volume last year. What started as a weird experiment out of Iowa has morphed into a full-blown asset class where retail traders, degens, and apparently people with very specific geopolitical intel are all swimming in the same pool.
Here’s how it actually works, who’s running the show, and why regulators are losing sleep over it.
The quick version
Prediction markets let you trade binary contracts on real-world events. Yes/no. Will it happen or not? The price floats between one cent and 99 cents, and that number represents what the crowd thinks the odds are.
Polymarket runs the decentralized side; Kalshi is the centralized heavyweight. Different approaches, same basic idea: get the outcome right, get paid a dollar per contract. Get it wrong, and your money’s gone.
According to Forbes, the space hit $44 billion in 2025. That number sounds absurd until you realize people are now trading everything from CPI prints to whether a specific country’s government collapses before June.
Where this whole thing came from
Back in 1988, the University of Iowa launched something called the Iowa Electronic Markets. It was for research. Academics trading on election outcomes. Nerdy stuff.
For the next 30-plus years, that was basically the ceiling — small-scale platforms, PredictIt hanging around, nobody really paying attention.
Then 2024 happened.
The US presidential election cycle turned Polymarket into the main character. Kalshi won a legal battle that let them list political event contracts in the US.
Now in 2026, you can trade contracts on Super Bowl outcomes, Fed decisions, crypto price milestones, and yes, the Oscars. It’s not just politics anymore. It’s everything.
Prediction market milestones. Source: Launchy
How a prediction market actually works
If you’ve ever traded a binary option, you already get the mechanics. If not, here’s the breakdown.
Every contract is tied to a specific event with clear resolution rules. Example: “Will the Fed cut rates by 50 basis points at the May meeting?” The outcome is determined by the official FOMC statement. No ambiguity.
You buy a “Yes” contract if you think it happens. Price is between $0.01 and $0.99. If you’re right and it settles at $1, you pocket the difference. If you’re wrong, you lose what you paid.
Example: You see BTC returning to $100 by the end of 2026. Market’s pricing that at roughly 38% odds — “Yes” contracts are trading at $0.39. You buy 100 contracts for $39. If BTC actually hits $100, those settle at $1 each ($100 in total). You walk with $61 profit. If it doesn’t, you’re out $39.
BTC price odds as of March 24, 2026. Source: Polymarket
No leverage or margin calls. Your downside is capped at whatever you put in. That’s part of why people like these things — you can’t get blown out past your initial bet.
Three stages:
Contract creation — Clear criteria, expiration date, settlement rules.Trading — Orders get matched either through a centralized order book or via a hybrid on-chain/off-chain system depending on the platform.Settlement — Event resolves, winners get paid. Fiat on Kalshi, USDC on Polymarket.
That’s it. Simple enough that anyone can play. Simple enough that millions are.
Kalshi vs. Polymarket: Two different worlds
These two platforms dominate the space, but they run completely different games.
Kalshi is centralized. Order book, matching engine, the whole traditional exchange setup. They spend roughly $35,000 a day on market-making incentives — about $12.7 million a year — just to keep liquidity alive across all their contracts. When you win, money lands in your bank account. Regulated. Compliant. Boring in the best way.
Kalshi interface. Source: Kalshi
Polymarket runs hybrid. Off-chain order matching, on-chain settlement via USDC on Polygon. No US banks involved, which means they can serve international users without getting tangled in the same regulatory web. Orders are authenticated through cryptographic signatures (EIP-712 if you want to get technical). Winners get paid to their connected wallet.
One is playing the regulated US game. The other is operating in the gray area that makes crypto what it is. Both are moving billions.
Enter Myriad: The beginner-friendly contender
While Polymarket and Kalshi battle for dominance in the high-stakes arena, a different kind of platform entered the scene in early 2025. Myriad, launched by Dastan (the parent company behind crypto media outlet Decrypt), takes a fundamentally different approach.
Unlike its competitors, Myriad is designed as a social, media-integrated experience. It plugs directly into platforms like Decrypt, letting users make predictions informed by actual news coverage rather than just gut instinct.
The on-chain protocol runs on USDC like Polymarket, but the onboarding experience is where the real difference lies.
Bets on oil price via Myriad. Source: Myriad
Myriad offers a points-based system that lets users learn market mechanics and practice trading without financial risk before graduating to real-money positions. It’s prediction markets with training wheels — intentionally built for the curious but cautious.
How they stack up
The three platforms now serve distinctly different audiences.
Myriad is the on-ramp for rookies and media consumers who want to understand the space before committing capital.Polymarket remains the go-to for crypto-natives outside the US — highest liquidity, widest market selection, and the decentralized ethos that core crypto users expect.Kalshi is the safe bet for US-based traders who prioritize regulatory compliance and don’t mind a centralized, TradFi-style experience.
That said, Myriad is still a marginal player in early 2026 when measured against Polymarket and Kalshi. Whether its strategy scales into meaningful market share is the open question heading into the rest of the year.
What people are actually trading
The old days of just betting on election winners are long gone. Here’s what’s moving volume in 2026:
Macro — Fed rate decisions, CPI prints, PCE data, GDP, jobs numbers. People are trading economic releases directly instead of playing them through derivatives.Politics — Elections worldwide, policy outcomes, leadership changes.Sports — Super Bowl, World Cup, March Madness. DraftKings and FanDuel have both rolled into this space with CFTC-licensed products.Crypto & tech — “Will Bitcoin hit $100k by December?” Protocol upgrades, regulatory decisions, product launches.Culture — Oscar winners, album releases, viral moments. Smaller volume but brings in the normies.Trending bets on Polymarket as of March 24, 2026. Source: Polymarket
The macro stuff is particularly interesting. Instead of trying to predict how bond markets react to a Fed decision, you can just trade the decision itself. Direct exposure without intermediaries.
The ugly side of prediction markets
Regulation is a mess.
At least 12 US states have cracked down on prediction market platforms. Some treat them as financial instruments. Others lump them in with gambling, which means different tax rules, weaker consumer protections, and licensing requirements straight out of a casino playbook.
The CFTC is trying to figure out how to police pseudonymous trading across borders. It is extremely difficult to trace the owners of the crypto wallets that lay the bets.
Insider trading is real.
Market observers are particularly suspicious of accounts that appear to split their bet between multiple wallets to hide their identity. Ben Yorke, formerly a researcher with CoinTelegraph, told the Guardian:
“Typically, when you see wallet-splitting and deliberate attempts to obfuscate identity, it’s one of two scenarios: either a very large investor trying to shield their position from market impact, or insider trading.”
The latest example involves eight accounts, all newly created around 21 March 2026, that bet a total of almost $70,000 on a US-Iran ceasefire by 31 March. If this happens, they stand to make nearly $820,000.
However, insiders do not appear to split their bets all the time — sometimes, they might go all-in:
March 2026: An account named “Magamyman” made $553,000 betting on the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Hours later, an Israeli strike killed him. The Israeli police have reportedly opened an investigation into the same user’s bet on the US would striking Iran on 28 February.A few weeks earlier: Another anonymous Polymarket account cleared $400,000 betting on the US invasion of Venezuela. Doubled down hours before the offensive started.
The White House denied anyone in Trump’s orbit had inside info. Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser at Polymarket through his VC firm’s investment. Coincidence or not, the optics are terrible.
The CFTC is supposedly working on frameworks to police this, but enforcement in a global pseudonymous environment? Don’t hold your breath.
Rumors move markets.
September 2025: Rumors about Trump’s health went wild. Over $1.6 million in bets flooded prediction markets before anyone actually knew anything. The president was fine. The money was gone.
Polymarket bets on Trump leaving office. Source: X.com
Liquidity is uneven.
Big events like elections or Fed decisions have deep order books and tight spreads. Niche stuff — say, a protocol upgrade on some obscure chain — you might be trading against nobody. Getting out at a fair price isn’t guaranteed.
Platform risks vary.
Decentralized platforms carry smart contract risk and potential network congestion when things get busy. Centralized ones have counterparty risk and a history of freezing during peak demand. Pick your poison.
What’s next
Prediction markets gave traders something TradFi never really offered — a way to bet directly on events instead of playing them through derivatives and hoping the correlation holds.
That’s powerful. It’s also messy.
The same features that make these markets useful — open access, pseudonymity, instant settlement — are the ones attracting bad actors. The insider trading scandals aren’t going away. The regulatory pressure isn’t letting up. And the liquidity issues aren’t fixing themselves.
Where this goes next depends on whether the platforms can clean up the insider edge, survive the regulatory squeeze, and keep delivering on the original promise: letting anyone trade on what happens next.
For now, $44 billion says people are willing to take that bet.
Prediction markets: From nerd project to $44B crypto frenzy was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.