By Emily Nicolle,Ira Boudway
and Carolyn Silverman / Bloomberg
The FIFA World Cup is turning prediction markets into a public ledger of million-dollar bets, exposing big wins and dramatic losses as the soccer tournament attracts more money to the fast-growing industry.More than US$5 billion has been traded on the World Cup across Polymarket’s international exchange and US-regulated Kalshi Inc this year, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of Dune Analytics data and company records. The boom has produced multimillion-dollar winners and some painful losses, including a bet-gone-wrong on Belgium to beat Egypt that cost one Polymarket user nearly US$9 million.The wagers offer a real-time view into the risks and potential rewards of an industry pushing beyond elections and economic events into mainstream sports. They also show why prediction markets are better understood, by some users, as entertainment rather than a way to make money.
Kalshi’s logo is pictured in an arranged photograph taken on April 22.
The 104-match competition is gaining momentum, with more group-stage contests and the knockout rounds still to come. Already, the World Cup and NBA Finals have pushed Kalshi to its first three-day streak of daily trading volumes above US$1 billion, chief executive officer Tarek Mansour said at a Bloomberg event on Tuesday.“Everything we’re seeing through the World Cup so far suggests that prediction markets are continuing on an aggressive growth trajectory,” said Chris Grove, an analyst at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming.
