FanDuel · 22

Crypto, AI and betting firms drive 2026 midterm elections corporate political spending to record highs

Comparatively, according to Reuters, in the 15 months up to the end of the first quarter of 2026, US companies have invested a record $517 million in the 2026 House of Representatives and Senate elections, surpassing the previous high of 461 million US dollars in two years of the 2024 election cycle. Together, the crypto, tech, and online betting industries contributed at least $294 million, making them a major force in shaping the midterm elections. Fairshake Super PAC, which is mainly funded by Coinbase, Ripple, and a16z, had $193 million in capital at the beginning of the year; a16z donated more than $81 million to crypto and AI-related PACs. Elon Musk has invested over $90 million, and Meta has donated $65 million to four super PACs. AI-related organization Leading the Future raised $140 million, and Anthropic donated at least $40 million through dark money nonprofits. Online sports betting companies DraftKings, FanDuel and others donated over $72 million. AdImpact expects total political advertising spending to reach a record $11.6 billion in this midterm election. Related industries spend unlimited amounts of money through super PACs, associated PACs, and dark money non-profit organizations for advertising, voter mobilization, etc. Critics believe this amplifies the influence of niche issues such as crypto regulation, data center energy, and betting regulation. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

2d agoburnking

Data: Polymarket has 43.1 million monthly visits, and the on-chain prediction market is becoming an important information platform

Comparing news, Nick Tomaino, founder of 1confirmation, posted an article on the X platform saying that in addition to media reports, Polymarket also has several notable developments. Over the past month, the Polymarket website reached 43.1 million visits (Similarweb data), surpassing the combined visits of FanDuel, DraftKings, and Kalshi, and has become one of the most visited fintech apps in the world, while its marketing investment is only a fraction of many leading fintech and prediction platforms. Nick Tomaino believes that Polymarket's growth is mainly due to its value as a “source of information,” and users are gaining a deeper understanding of real-world events by predicting the market. Polymarket currently has a leading position in the on-chain prediction market. The transparency and global accessibility brought about by the on-chain architecture is the key to driving the prediction market to achieve “better information and more realistic perception.” Furthermore, he pointed out that the US application of Polymarket is still in its early stages, but the product and commercialization are gradually maturing and beginning to enter a stage of rapid development.

18d ago

Kalshi CEO: Polymarket is not a major competitor, CME, Robinhood and DraftKings are a bigger threat

Comparing the news, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said in an interview with Front Office Sports that he does not see Polymarket as a major competitor, but is more concerned about the threat posed by CME Group, Robinhood, and sports betting operators. According to Bank of America analyst data, Kalshi accounts for about 91% of the US regulated forecast market, holds about $1 billion of the industry's approximately $1.6 billion outstanding contracts, and lists about 97% of the active market. Kalshi traded around $9.8 billion over the past 30 days, close to Polymarket's $9.9 billion. CME launched FanDuel Predicts in December last year; after building a prediction market based on the Kalshi exchange in 2025, Robinhood began switching some of its contracts to its Rothera platform in partnership with Susquehanna. Mansour called on Polymarket to be included in the regulatory framework, saying its offshore platform's insider trading cases hurt the entire industry. The CFTC issued a 267-page rule proposal on June 10 to allow multiple sports contracts but prohibit in-game betting and pre-college sports. The public comment period is 45 days.

65d ago

Kalshi CEO: When it comes to competitors, the first thing that comes to mind is not Polymarket, but platforms such as CME and Robinhood

Comparing the news, Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour said in an interview with FOX: “To be honest, when I think about competitors, it's not Polymarket that comes to mind, but some other platforms. We are being surrounded by a group of competitors. In a follow-up interview, Tarek mainly mentioned CME and Robinhood. The former helped gaming giant FanDuel launch its own prediction market product, and the latter has also launched its own prediction market Rothera. Additionally, Tarek mentioned DraftKings, Novig, and Coinbase.

65d ago

Predicting the rise of the market: how many pieces of cake are left for spinach players?

In the past few years, the forecasting market has risen to prominence and has achieved an astonishing hundred-fold increase thanks to the US election. After the election, sports became the most traded sector in the prediction market, competing with traditional spinach companies for the fat meat of the US sports betting market worth more than 30 billion US dollars. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev mentioned in an interview that the sports spinach company must have realized the seriousness of the situation and understood that it could completely disrupt their business. The prediction market has become a new way for millions of Americans to bet on sporting events and elections, so people can't help but speculate: how much of the spinach market share is being taken by the prediction market? This article will use public data to do some analysis to try to resolve the doubts of all the judges. Predicting market performance In the first few months of 2025, the monthly trading volume of Polymarket and Kalshi hovered between 800 million and 1.2 billion US dollars. By October, it ushered in a blowout. Polymarket's monthly trading volume jumped to US$3.02 billion, an increase of 110% in a single month. Kalshi also grew to about 4.4 billion US dollars, reaching 5.8 billion US dollars in November, and set a record of 6.38 billion US dollars in December. The reason for Kalshi's explosive growth is that it reached a strategic partnership with Robinhood and was directly embedded into a traditional retail brokerage app with tens of millions of active users, bringing in massive amounts of new traditional finance capital and small white users. Polymarket also obtained a compliance license from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) through the acquisition, reopening the US domestic market. Another major reason is that October is a super golden period for North American sports. With Americans' favorite NFL, the new NBA season has begun, and the MLB playoffs are also being played. According to the comprehensive operating rate of 16.8 billion US dollars per month in February 2026 (Polymarket 7 billion US dollars + Kalshi 9.8 billion US dollars), the market is expected to achieve an annual transaction volume of more than 200 billion US dollars. If the growth momentum continues, the predicted market size may reach 1.1 trillion US dollars by 2030. Not bad, right? Has the spinach platform been encroached upon? On the day Kalshi launched “Kalshi Combos” (Kalshi Combos), the DraftKings (DKNG) stock price once plummeted by more than 12%, and the market value evaporated by about 2.5 billion US dollars in a single day. Flutter's (FLUT) stock price plummeted by more than 10%, and the market value evaporated by about 5.5 billion US dollars in a single day. Wall Street analysts pointed out that the advent of Kalshi Combos marks the official entry of the prediction market into the core territory of traditional betting, and Parlays is the most profitable and deepest moat business for DraftKings and FanDuel. DraftKings CEO Jason Robins talked about falling stock prices in an interview, saying that this is not only a threat from prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, but it is indeed one of the main reasons. Under media portrayals, a voice began to spread: predicting that the market is disrupting and devouring the 100 billion dollar empire of traditional sports betting. But what is the truth? If we compare the actual turnover of compliant sports giants such as FanDuel and DraftKings, and Stake, an unregulated crypto casino hegemon, and Polymarket in the same data dimension, we'll find that no real encroachment occurred between 2023 and 2025; the two showed explosive growth in parallel on two tracks. According to the latest “Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracking” report published by the American Gaming Association, the US legal sports betting industry hit record highs in both 2024 and 2025. Total US commercial gaming revenue reached $78.72 billion in 2025, up 9.2% year over year. Legal gaming contributed $181 billion in tax revenue to state and local governments, up 15.1% year over year. And this doesn't include data on non-compliant crypto casinos such as Stake. Although Stake remains privatized and financial reports are not disclosed, through recent disclosures such as KuCoin research, MEXC news, etc., its current volume is extremely impressive: the total amount of bets processed by Stake is stable at around $10 billion per month, and the monthly...

143d agoLuxurytracy

Why is it rare for the two major prediction market giants to join forces to inject capital?

Author: Wenser 2010 Original title: Kalshi and Polymarket jointly invest in a new fund to predict a major step in the “ecology” of the market and predict that behind the steady rise in market trading volume, its ecology is also rapidly expanding. Yesterday, 5c (c) Capital, a venture capital agency initiated by two former Kalshi employees, released its latest fundraising plan to raise $35 million to forecast market-related startup investments. Notably, the agency has not only received support from Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, and other investors include a16z, Ribbit Capital, and Multicoin Capital stakeholders. At the same time, the agency is not only the first venture capital agency to focus on forecasting investment in the market industry, but it is also the same entity that invests capital at the same time, the two giants of the forecasting market, Kalshi and Polymarket, and can be called an “industry breakthrough.” Judging from previous news such as Kalshi's launch of a prediction market alliance, plans to hold a prediction market conference, Polymarket's opening of LP market incentives, and the endless variety of predictive market data platforms on the market, the prediction market is gradually breaking away from the native crypto market and gradually becoming independent as an emerging industry ecosystem. When the trading volume of an industry grows tens of times in just one year, and when the monthly trading volume of a platform is comparable to that of the entire industry a few months ago, it is predicted that the market is invading the hinterland of traditional betting platforms with a destructive attitude. Polymarket CEO invests in Kalshi's former employee: The two founders are veterans of Kalshi — Adhi Rajabhakaran was Kalshi's No. 2 trader in Kalshi Trading, and the creator of the well-known podcast program “50 Cent Dollars” to predict the market; Noah Zingler-Sternig worked as a veteran of Kalshi Kalshi's Head of Operations (similar to COO), who led Kalshi's integration with Robinhood Markets Inc. In addition, the fund plans to invest in about 20 companies over the next two years, focusing on market makers, index design, etc. to predict the direction of market infrastructure; its first round of fundraising will be completed within the next month. Luxury investor group: spanning traditional venture capital, crypto venture capital, prediction markets, and traditional sports betting platforms In addition to confirmed Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, who did not respond positively, 5c (c) Capital's other investors can be called “luxury heaven” — including Marc Andreessen of A16z (who participated through the Moneta Luna Fund) “Venture capital veterans” also include industry veterans such as Ribbit Capital founder Micky Malka and former Multicoin Capital managing partner Kyle Samani, and even industry insiders such as the investment manager of Millennium, a hedge fund with over $70 billion in asset management, and the founder of predictive market platform PredictIt. If the above list of investors is more about considering the interests of venture capital institutions, then the behavior of the following two investors can be called “industry demand behavior” similar to Polymarket and Kalshi. According to information, the names of the fantasy sports platform Underdog CEO Jeremy Levine and sports prediction platform Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky are also clearly on the list. It can be seen that while the industry is developing rapidly, prediction market platforms and even traditional sports betting platforms are trying their best to consolidate their development foundation. Anticipating the ambition of new funds in the market: Future industry trading volume or up to $10 trillion It is worth mentioning that the two founders of 5c (c) Capital mentioned 2 key messages in this investment document: their...

151d agoburnking#Kalshi #Polymarket #Predicting the market

After dismantling 203 million deals, we discovered the truth about Kalshi's profiteering

Author: Sam Schneider Original title: What's Kalshi's Revenue? Compiled and compiled: BitPushNews assumes it's 2005 and you founded a company called “Meth Labs, Inc.” You began to solicit clients and get venture capital. Before you know it, the company was listed on the NYSE with the stock code $METH. People can buy and sell your shares, and even build Iron Hawk options strategies. The NYSE provides a centralized market where buyers and sellers trade, and prices are adjusted in real time as information is disclosed. I mentioned the NYSE just now, but there are also many stock exchanges in the world (such as NASDAQ, London Stock Exchange, Shanghai Stock Exchange, etc.), all of which facilitate the trading of securities. In fact, the market is so important to society that even if you're not an avid day trader, you're constantly interacting with them... Uber connects drunkards and drivers, Facebook connects people to used furniture, and your dad is trying to get you a job... Let's say you want to retire, sell your $METH shares, and get involved in other charitable causes. Who would buy these stocks? And at what price should they be sold? The market defines the price at which people are willing to buy and sell things (price discovery). The market provides a platform for people to trade assets because probably no one in your domain wants to buy your $METH (liquidity). But what if these markets don't show the price per share, but the probability of a discrete event occurring? These are known as prediction markets (Prediction Markets). Whether through handwriting on a small occasion or through centralized, large-scale, and well-funded companies like Kalshi and Polymarket, forecasting markets are different from stock trading: they are binary. Things either happen or they don't. They settle as soon as specific events occur, results are reached, or time expires. You can't buy $METH shares by predicting the market, but you can bet that $METH will trade between $122 and $124 on January 6th. In this article, we'll take a frame-by-frame look at the billions of dollars flowing through these markets, see how FTX's “legacy” continues, how much of it is sports betting, and find out how much money Kalshi actually makes. History/Getting Started Kalshi and Polymarket were launched in 2018 and 2020, respectively. Although these two companies form the current duopoly, the origins of the forecasting market date back much longer. One of the veterans is the Iowa Electronics Marketplace (IEM), which has been hosting prediction markets since 1988. Betting on one person's “beliefs” can get you into trouble, but group intelligence is still a valuable predictive power. Refer to a paper published by Wolfer and Zitzewitz in 2004: “The average absolute error in these markets predicting Democratic and Republican candidate votes was about 1.5 percentage points... and the final Gallup poll produced a forecast error of 2.1 percentage points.” However... for so many years, something has been missing... that has prevented us from gathering predictions, building markets, reaching millions of people, and using them for personal gain. The missing part is a well-funded crypto web app that provides you with free supplies and the ability to bet on whether the next pope is transgender. Just as Hayek expected when writing “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (The Use of Knowledge in Society). We'll be exploring Kalshi in detail, but there are other projects/agreements in this area. How does it all work? The prediction market has expanded the surface area of human gambling. Personally, I'd bet $10 that I can finish 10 bottles of beer before midnight, and my wife probably won't believe it. On this side, I said “Yes, I can finish ten bottles,” and TA said “No, you can't finish drinking”. Replace “me” with LeBron James, “beer” for points, and “before midnight” for the end of the game, and you have a real market where you can trade on Kalshi. In Kalshi, a market (Market) refers to a single binary market with a “yes” or “no” settlement. An event (Event) is a collection of such markets, but...

159d agoWendy#CFTC #DraftKings #fanatics #FanDuel #Kalshi #Predicting the market

Traditional bookmakers bet on predicting the market with the intention of “downsizing” Wall Street traders

Author: Sportico Compiled by: Azuma Original title: Traditional gaming giants are predicting the market and want to attack Wall Street As the prediction market explodes, two types of groups are watching — they are from Wall Street and Morton Street (where the gaming company Fanatics is headquartered). On the one hand, they are professional financial trading companies, and on the other, traditional gaming service providers, both think they have the ability to become top predators. The bookmaker took to market and the three traditional sports betting service providers — DraftKings, Fanatics, and FanDuel — have all entered the forecasting market to address the threat this emerging business has posed to their main business. After experiencing a cooling in investor sentiment, these companies are catching up and seeing their rich experience in the gaming industry as a potential competitive advantage. DraftKings, Fanatics, and FanDuel have all begun or intend to provide “odds” in their prediction market apps through associated market makers. This is similar to their business in traditional sports betting, but the main difference is that in the prediction market, they need to compete with third parties who can also place orders. According to Sportico's communication with relevant company executives and industry analysts, there is currently no consensus that betting companies can obtain higher returns than professional financial trading companies by going directly to the market, but bookmakers are confident in the profit potential of the market making business. Peter Jackson, CEO of FanDuel's parent company Flutter Entertainment, said during the November third-quarter earnings call: “The core competency required by market makers is the ability to accurately price complex and interrelated results. This is exactly what our core business does every day.” Fanatics already has an active affiliate market maker called Morton St. Market Maker LLC — the name derives from its parent company's location on Morton Street, New York City's office street, from where it is possible to walk to some of its Wall Street rivals. Morton St. Market Maker will also provide odds for trading contracts on Crypto.com, which is the underlying prediction market platform integrated by Fanatics. Meanwhile, both DraftKings and FanDuel have hinted at the existence of an associated market making team that will conduct counter market transactions with their clients, but it is currently unclear whether DraftKings or FanDuel have officially established a related entity. To ensure that all users can quickly enter and exit positions at close to fair prices, market makers usually need to provide liquidity on both sides of the “YES/NO” during a specific period of time, and their profit comes from the small difference between the “buy now” and “sell now” offers. For example, if a user buys a contract won by Metropolitan New York for $0.50, and the market maker previously obtained the contract for $0.47 through a price limit order, the market maker can earn $0.03. The Wolf of Wall Street is surrounded in reverse and stands on the other side of the bookmaker. It is a professional trading agency from Wall Street. Although Wall Street companies such as Susquehanna International Group are experienced in financial derivatives trading, some industry insiders interviewed by Sportico said that Wall Street is indeed inferior to traditional bookmakers in setting odds for sporting events. Alfonso Straffon, who has worked in market making services in both Wall Street junk bonds and sports betting, said, “I would like to remind Wall Street companies not to take advantage of them. Sports betting is an ecosystem that has been around for a long time.” Sporting events present more complex risk management challenges for market makers, especially during a game, where any progression — such as an injury, weather change, or coach decisions — can drastically change the true value of a bet. “Multiple orders” bring additional risk, and an occasional mistake can result in huge losses. Once the exchange supports leveraged trading, this risk will be further amplified. Advanced data models and the ability to access information before the public — these are the strengths of traditional bookmakers — and are critical to reducing risk. However, this does not mean that bookmakers can reliably win in predicting the market. Another sports betting company founder tends to think that with deeper capital and adapting to different types of money...

191d agoburnking#DraftKings #fanatics #FanDuel #Wall Street #gaming

Is the biggest winner of the Super Bowl the prediction market?

Source: Bankless Author: David Christopher Original title: Did Prediction Markets Win the Super Bowl? Compiled and compiled: BitPushNews This year's Super Bowl — Seattle Seahawks vs. New England Patriots — marked a turning point: for the first time, the prediction market was clearly viewed as the real rival of traditional sports betting, although it did not have the superstar effect of the Chiefs on the Eagles last year when Taylor Swift helped. The two major prediction market platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket, have both set up markets around this game, halftime shows, commercials, etc. The preliminary data depicts an interesting and complicated picture. A quick note before we begin: sports bookmakers haven't aggregated their total bets — this will take a few days. Therefore, this article is based on sports betting parties' forecast data and predicting the actual trading volume of the market. Sports betting forecast: A new high, but the growth rate is slowing down. The American Gaming Association predicts that US sports betting companies will bet about 1.76 billion US dollars in the 60th Super Bowl, which will set a record, with a year-on-year increase of about 27%. Although the exact numbers vary slightly from source to source, most predictions point in the same direction: reaching new highs, continuing the eight years of growth since the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports betting in 2018. But the growth rate is clearly slowing down. Currently, 39 states and Washington, D.C., have opened sports betting, and only Missouri is a new addition to the current cycle — which means that the surge in previous years, driven by market expansion, is giving way to gradual growth. In this context, predicting the market is another factor inhibiting growth. Ed Birkin of H2 Gambling Capital told “Fortune” magazine that he estimates that the market will account for 80% of the year-on-year increase in gambling activity this year, and predicts that the market's trading volume will reach US$630 million throughout the tournament. Based on the data currently available, the predicted market performance appears to be far below that figure. Kalshikalshi's market dedicated to the Super Bowl (that is, contracts directly linked to games, halftime shows, and broadcasts) generated impressive but unanticipated trading volume: Bad Bunny halftime show opening track: $113.5 million Which companies will premiere commercials: $72.2 million Who will perform during the game: $47.3 million. In these top markets alone, the total trading volume is about $233 million, which is far below analysts' predictions of the overall forecast market of $630 million. Additionally, Kalshi's flagship NFL market—a “who will win the Super Bowl” contract that has been open for months and lasts throughout the season — has a total trading volume of over $500 million. But that number reflects cumulative trading volume throughout the NFL season, not just Super Bowl weekend. Even so, this is less than one-third of the amount that sports bookmakers expect to bet on a single Super Bowl game. Over the past few months, sports betting has accounted for the vast majority (over 90%) of Kalshi's total trading volume, thanks to its promotion channels that are no less than or superior to sports betting companies. First, Kalshi is federally regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which means that US users can use it directly through its mobile app, just like using a sports betting app. Coupled with the advertising capital reserves provided by super venture capital and the partnership with Robinhood, Kalshi stood out. This foundation is paying off: in January of this year alone, Kalshi had 1.9 million downloads, while DraftKings and FanDuel's new prediction market app in December last year had a combined download of less than 100,000 (the two apps went live in states where their traditional sports betting apps are not allowed, but the response has been mediocre so far). Additionally, DraftKings also partnered with Crypto.com on Friday to expand its event contract product, which shows that existing giants are taking this threat seriously. PolymarketPolymarket's NFL market volume is around $700 million throughout the season — higher than Kalshi — but the situation in its Super Bowl-specific market is different. Polymarket's top three Super Bowl markets have a total trading volume of about $76 million: Home game market: $55.26 million Super Bowl MVP: $12 million Who will perform the halftime show: $9 million Polymarket lacks Kalshi's regulatory approval in the US, which means US users cannot directly access it through the mobile app. From technology...

193d agoWendy#DraftKings #FanDuel #Kalshi #Polymarket #Super bowl #Predicting the market #Forecast market topics

In-depth research report: Fintech relies on a draw to win, while DeFi's turnover is trillions but only makes a fraction

Source: Artemis & Fintech Architects Original title: Report: Is Fintech or DeFi a better financial system? Compiled and compiled: BitPushNews Foreword: Fintech Architects and digital finance think tank Artemis jointly released the first comparative analysis report on key performance indicators (KPIs) between fintech (Fintech) and decentralized finance (DeFi). If you've ever struggled with Robinhood or Uniswap who is a better asset to invest in, then you've come to the right place. For the first time, this report compares fintech stocks and crypto tokens in the same dimension. Covering fields such as payments, digital banking, transactions, lending and forecasting markets, the report compares revenue, number of users, take rates (take rates), industry KPIs, and valuation metrics. The results are shocking: Hyperliquid's transaction volume has reached more than 50% of Robinhood's; the total amount of outstanding loans from DeFi protocol Aave has surpassed that of Buy-To-Pay giant Klarna; stablecoin settlement networks are growing far faster than traditional payment providers; and wallets such as Phantom and MetaMask have enough users to rival digital banking giants such as Nubank and Revolut. We found that valuations fully reflect this game: crypto assets are either at a very high premium or at a deep discount, depending on their expected ability to cash out. Ultimately, we think the core question of merging the two is: will the crypto industry learn to establish a “toll booth”, or will the fintech industry switch to the crypto industry's “open track”? The game between the two financial systems For many years, we have always viewed cryptocurrency and fintech as parallel universes. One is a system that is regulated, audited, and traded on NASDAQ; the other is a system for trading on decentralized and centralized exchanges without permission. They share a common language: revenue, volume, payments, borrowing, trading, but with different “accents.” This situation is changing. As Stripe bought Bridge, Robinhood launched a prediction marketplace, and PayPal minted its own stablecoin, the lines began to blur. The question is, when these two worlds collide, what is the power comparison? Comparison chart description: In our chart, purple represents cryptocurrencies (Crypto) and green represents equity companies (Equities). Currently, Robinhood has the highest trading volume, but Hyperliquid is in second place... We decided to conduct this experiment: select well-known fintech companies in the fields of payments, digital banking, buy and pay later (BNPL), and retail brokers, and stack them against crypto-native benchmarking protocols. We used the same metrics (P/S market rate, ARPU per capita revenue, total TPV payments, number of users, etc.). The green bar chart represents US stocks, and the purple bar chart represents the token agreement. A panoramic picture of these two financial systems has emerged: on-chain financial agreements often match or surpass fintech rivals in terms of transaction volume and asset size, yet they capture only a fraction of the economic benefits of each other. In contrast, the valuation of crypto assets is either extremely high or extremely low, and there is little middle ground. Moreover, the two are not growing at the same rate at all. Payment sector: The capital flow channel begins with the largest category of fintech - capital transfer. Green camp (lots of giants): PayPal's annual transaction volume is $1.76 trillion. Adyen's processing volume amounts to $1.5 trillion. Fiserv (that almost forgotten infrastructure layer) processed $320 billion. Block (formerly Square) has driven $255 billion through Cash App and merchant networks. Purple Camp (Artemis estimated annualized B2B payments): Tron moved $68 billion in stablecoins. Ethereum reached $41.2 billion. BNB was $18.6 billion. Solana is around $6.5 billion. Judging from the absolute numbers, the two are not on the same scale. The amount of stablecoin transfers across all major public chains is only about traditional...

203d agoWendy#Adyen #Bridge #DeFi #Fintech #Fiserv #Robinhood #depths #Predicting the market