The prediction market sector has been on the ascendancy since the start of the year and last month in June was the first month where we saw a steep acceleration in trading volumes and the total number of trades. Artemis data shows that prediction markets have set yet another monthly high this month with volume across the sector reaching $55.5 billion, up from 52.8 billion in June. In terms of trades, this month has seen 383.9 million against 332.2 million a month earlier. Back-to-back all-time highs on volume and activity, in the same month the World Cup knockout fixtures and the finals were played. 

Source: Artemis

The tournament and specifically the knockout format through July fit the product almost too neatly. Every knockout fixture was a short-dated binary that settled within hours of the whistle. No open-ended questions about rate decisions or election outcomes months away. A team advances or it doesn’t. Short, binary and very quick to settle, a perfect structure that drew in millions of traders. 

Kalshi’s Share Held at 70% Through the Record Month 

Despite the entire sector growing over the past two months, this is a Kalshi record. The CFTC-regulated platform accounted for $38.6 billion of the $55.5 billion and saw 272.3 million trades out of a total of 383.9 million over the course of the month. The share works out to roughly 70% on both measures. 

Since the start of the year, Kalshi’s monthly bar chart for trading volume has been in an uptrend and has grown faster than any other platform out there. July only stretched this lead further. The fact is, Polymarket’s might have grown over the past two months, but its share of the total keeps compressing as the leader scales. 

Five Platforms Below the Top Two Cleared Nine Figures 

Underneath the top two, the smaller venues are no longer rounding errors. Rothera cleared $1.7 billion and Nadex printed $1.1 billion, putting two more platforms in billion-dollar territory. Opinion did $826.7 million, Predictdotfun $718.2 million and Limitless $236.4 million. HIP-4 came in at $123.8 million and ForecastEx at $28 million.

Read together, those two paragraphs describe a market doing two things at once. It is consolidating at the top, where Kalshi keeps taking share, and broadening at the bottom, where five or six venues now clear nine figures a month. Both trends can run at the same time when the overall pie is growing this quickly. The test comes when it stops.

Trade counts tell a slightly different story about who the users are. Predictdotfun logged 15.6 million trades on $718.2 million of volume, which works out to very small average ticket sizes. Kalshi and Polymarket dominate on both axes, but the ratio between dollars and trades varies enough across the tail to suggest genuinely different customer bases rather than clones fighting over the same traders.

Weekly Volume Is Cooling, and That Number Matters More Than July’s Total 

Volumes have come down since the final, which nobody should find surprising. A tournament that produces a resolvable event every few days is a temporary supply of trading opportunities, and when it ends, that supply ends with it.

The useful detail is where the decline stops. Weekly figures have so far stayed above the pre-June baseline, meaning some portion of the World Cup cohort is still trading something else. If that holds through August, the sector picked up durable users during the tournament rather than renting them for six weeks. If weekly volume keeps sliding back toward May levels, July looks like a spike built on one event.

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