Overview
- Polymarket reported $8 billion in trading volume and Kalshi $9 billion in January 2026, with activity now reaching hundreds of millions of dollars per day.
- Federal Reserve economists in February found Kalshi-style markets deliver high-frequency, distributionally rich expectations data useful to researchers and policymakers.
- Professional traders are using contracts to manage exposure to central-bank moves, trade policy and geopolitical events, with surges tied to Kevin Warsh’s Fed chair nomination and a recent Iran flare-up outpacing major sports days.
- Contracts now inform real-world positioning, from oil traders tracking Russia–Ukraine ceasefire probabilities to equity desks watching tariff markets, and even targeted hedges around discrete events such as Rocket Lab’s Neutron launch.
- International participation is expanding fastest in volatile economies where contracts function like priced insurance, while users anticipate a move beyond simple binary outcomes to conviction-weighted, conditional and index-referenced products.