Polymarket and Kalshi rule 97.5 per cent of transactions and predict any black horses in the market

Original title: The State of Protection Markets: 2026

Original by Jack Haldorsson

Original language: Peggy

Editor by: Forecasting markets is moving from small-scale encryption to more mainstream financial and information markets。

The US election in 2024 allowed Polymarket and Kalshi to be seen by the public, but the real change in the industry narrative was that trade did not disappear quickly after the election. Markets such as sports, science and technology, and the economy have caught up in the flow and have proved that forecasting long-term demand in the market does not come from political events alone。

This paper combes the core pattern of the market forecast for 2026: on the one hand, the two oligarchs formed by Polymarket, which relied on chain trading, USDC settlements and media distribution to expand its influence, on the other hand, on the access to mainstream finance through channels such as CFC compliance and Robinhood, and on the other hand, on new platforms to look for opportunities in short-term trading, sports forecasting, media embedding, chain-based indicators and infrastructure layers。

Of even greater concern is the fact that projected competition in the market is no longer just a competition in terms of volume of transactions, but rather a combination of liquidity, distribution capacity and regulatory pathways. At the same time, brushing, trade statistics disputes, currency drop expectations and state-level regulatory pressure also indicate that the track is still at a highly uncertain stage。

The forecast market is no longer just a DeFi experiment. It is becoming a new asset class for financial transactions, media content and algorithmic strategies. What is really possible in the future is not a generic replica, but a platform with clear vertical scenarios and distribution advantages。

The following is the original text:

TWO PLATFORMS THAT WERE BARELY HEARD IN 2022, AND LAST YEAR'S SETTLEMENT OF NOMINAL TRANSACTIONS EXCEEDED NEW ZEALAND'S GDP。

In 2025, the combined transactions of Kalshi and Polymarket reached $44 billion. In May 2026, Kalshi completed $1 billion in financing at $22 billion. ICE, the head company of the New York Stock Exchange, committed to invest $2 billion in Polymark at $9 billion. AI Agent has executed over 30 percent of the chain transactions. In the meantime, a new team is on the way to Base, SolanaHyperliquid& nbsp; and Arweave on a vertically exclusive platform - They are all held in custody by a judgement that these two giants cannot monopolize all goods。

This may be the most complete overview of the ecological integrity of forecast market builders。

The numbers of the narratives

The year 2024 marks the moment of validation of the forecast market. The United States presidential election alone, the single market, brought Polymarket a $3.3 billion deal. During the campaign period, almost all major FEIC editorial departments began reporting on projected market rates. Bloomberg, Politico and FiveThirtyEight all cited these data in the analysis。

But what happened after November 5th was unexpected to many: the volume of transactions did not fall back to previous baseline levels. The sports market captured this part of the flow。

By the end of 2025, the sports market had accounted for 85 per cent of Kalshi transactions and 39 per cent of Polymark transactions. The S & T market grew by 1,637 per cent and the economic market by 905 per cent. And the political market - a vertical area that has been widely recognized as a projection of market core drivers - grew by only 43 per cent。

The forecast market finds its own long-term engine, which is not an election。

Double oligarchic pattern

Polymarket operates on Polygon and settles in USDC, with the intention of not charging fees in most markets, giving priority to establishing turnover advantages. In October 2025, ICE invested $2 billion in strategic investments with a post-investment valuation of about $9 billion. In June 2025, X declared Polymarket its official forecast market partner. In February 2026, Substack originally compiled real-time compensation rate data for Polymarket; in just a few weeks, one fifth of Substack's top 250 publications started using these data. The platform CMO also confirmed that POLY tokens and airdrops were about to be launched. Once fully functional, it is expected that its revenue from annualized fees will exceed $200 million。

Kalshi obtained CFTC ' s designated contract market qualification, became the first platform for the event contract to obtain such qualifications and turned it into a distribution barrier. It's this compliance that allowed Kalshi to enter Robinwood. In 2025 alone, Robinhood facilitated more than 4 billion incident contracts. In January 2025, Kalshi went online to the Super Bowl related market. In less than 12 months, the sports market has skyrocketed from about 10 per cent to over 85 per cent of its trade volume. In May 2026, Kalshi completed $1 billion in financing, valued at $22 billion, with investments from Coatue, Sequoia, a16z, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley and ARK. When the financing was completed, Kalshi had about 2 million live monthly users, an annualized trade volume of about $178.0 billion and an annualized income of about $1.5 billion。

In 2025, the two companies together controlled approximately 97.5 per cent of the total projected market industry。

Ecographic

Challengers

In addition to the two oligarchs, more than a dozen teams are already building new market platforms for forecasting. They each aim at a specific gap。

@trylimites is deployed on Base, with short-term markets, including 15 minutes, hour and day markets, for encrypted currency and stock traders who want quick settlement. The project is financed by a total of $10 million from institutions such as 1 confirration, Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, DCG and Arrington. In the first quarter of 2026, monthly transactions reached $1.1 billion. When the $LMTS token came online, the total diluted valuation reached $800 million。

@MyriadMarkets runs on the Abstract chain and brings together Linea, Celo and BNB. It's betting on the "media raw" forecast market. The first distribution collaboration took place in December 2025, when the Platform embedded the predictive function in Trust Wallet. There are now over 430,000 users, and cumulatively over 1.7 million forecasts. The project was created by the team behind Decrypt and Rug Radio。

KASH embeds X by @kash bot, allowing users to create and trade forecast markets in their references. In February 2026, KASH financed $2 million from institutions such as Big Brain Holdings, Spartan, Coinbase Ventures, Animoca and Sui Foundation. At its core, it is judged that those who have the shortest access to the scene where the user has stayed will win the forecast market。

@DriftProtocol is based on a $500 million Solana mobile pool. It supports 30 multiple mortgage assets, allows cross-collateralized positions, and provides FUEL incentives。

@HedzhogMarnet aimed at primary indicators on the chain, such as Base fees, money rates, certificationer performance, etc., while also providing generic binary options on Solana and Eclipse. The platform supported the creation of markets without permission, peaking at about $20 million。

@HyperliquidX HIP-4 went online on May 2, 2026 and was designed with the participation of the head of the Kalshi encryption operation John Wang. The mechanism is entirely UDSH as collateral, follows the CLOB order book model and does not charge warehouse charges. The first market, officially deployed by Hyperliquid, revolved around the results of the BTC, and the first day of trading reached $6 million. At present, @Outcompexyz is the main front end of HIP-4, contributing more than 10 times the volume of transactions in any other interface。

@azuroprotocol is more like infrastructure than a front-end product for ordinary users. It provides other teams with a sports forecast market layer, designed using the Liquidity Tree mobility pool. The project has financed $11 million from institutions such as Delphi Digital, Gnosis and Arrington Capital。

@Overtime io runs on Optimism, Arbitrum and Base. All the revenues of the agreement will go to $OVER to buy back。

@RobinwoodApp, supported by the back end of Kalshi, facilitated more than 2 billion incident contracts in the third quarter of 2025 alone。

Infrastructure layers are also starting to warm up. In August 2025, @theclearingco completed $15 million in seed ship finance with investments from Union Square Ventures, Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Varant. The company was founded by former executives of Polymarket and Kalshi. The onset of capital flows to settlements usually means that an asset class is maturing。

Core drivers for 2026

The regulated platform is looking for a chain track. Kalshi monetizes the market and deploys it to Solana, Polymarket, by acquiring QCEX to advance US CFTC compliance, Hyperliquid HIP-4 was designed with Kalshi's participation - all in the same direction: The bottom layer is a global liquid layer, with the upper layer superseding the regulatory shell from different regions。

AI Agent has become an integral part of projected market activity. According to the analysis platform LayerHub, more than 30% of the wallets on Polymark are running AI Agent. Olas Pollystrat Agent carried out more than 4,200 transactions in the first month on the line, with a maximum yield of 376 per cent in individual positions. Elastics also completed $2 million in financing to try to create a natural language trade interface。

Whether or not the platform team was designed as such at the outset, the forecast market is becoming an algorithmic trading place。

Media platforms are looking at the forecast rate as a highly sticky content. The official partnership agreement for X, the original integration of Substack and Google Finance demonstrate real-time recovery rates, all of which are essentially the same: Turning financial issues into media events that can be discussed together, thereby promoting natural hospitality。

Sport is the most sustainable vertical track. The United States General Election in 2024 brought the first users, and sports left them behind. Any new platform that was financed in 2026 without a sports strategy is either building deep infrastructure or making a high concentration of bets in a particular subdivision。

The real challenge

Three risks deserve immediate attention。

First, the trade volume indicators themselves are controversial. Paradigm ' s analysis, published in December 2025, indicated that the NegRisk structure of Polymarket would lead to double counting of most third-party data tracking tools. CertiK estimates that out of a portion of Pollymarket transactions in 2024, brush transactions account for close to 60% of peaks. As a result, the figure of $44 billion would be more appropriate as a directional reference rather than a strictly audited accurate data。

Secondly, legal friction at the state level is real. As of January 2026, the number of relevant federal proceedings had exceeded 19. In March 2026, Ohio ruled that Kalshi ' s sports products were gambling. The Attorney General of Wisconsin and Arizona have also initiated action on each of the two platforms. The strong resistance at the federal level from the CFTC, coupled with strong resistance at the state level, will not disappear soon。

THIRD, CURRENCY SPECULATION IS PUSHING UP THE PLATFORM. IN 2025 AND AT THE BEGINNING OF 2026, A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THE VOLUME TRADED WAS RELATED TO THE MARKET ' S EXPECTATIONS OF POLY AIRDROPS. IT IS MISLEADING FOR ANY PLATFORM TO PUBLISH ONLY BEAUTIFUL TRADE VOLUME FIGURES WITHOUT DESCRIBING THAT BACKGROUND。

Conclusions

In 2024, the forecast market completed a crossover from the Interesting DeFi Experiment to the Financial Assets Category. By 2025, it began to build institutional-level pipelines: strategic investment by exchange parent companies, CFTC-related settlements, Robinwood integration, and seed ship financing at the clearinghouse level。

By 2026, the real question on this track was: who has a chance to win, except for Kalshi and Polymarket

The answer is now: those who are deep-seated in vertical areas, have a clear distribution advantage and can find a regulatory protection path or a fluid density on the chain。

The opportunity for a generic replica is over. Beyond that, other routes remain open。

If you are also building in this area and want to find the right growth architecture for your own vertical track, you are welcome to talk。

Original Link