Online prediction markets soared in popularity last year in the run-up to the United States elections — and then claimed vindication when they appeared to reflect Donald J. Trump’s victory faster than opinion polls did.
Now one of the biggest players in the business, Kalshi, is moving to make its contracts available to more bettors looking to wager on some of the biggest events in politics, business and sports — from guessing the correct number of “yes” votes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will receive in his bid to become Mr. Trump’s health secretary to which companies will run Super Bowl ads.
Kalshi is expected to announce on Friday that users will now be able to buy into its prediction markets directly from brokerages, just as they can purchase stocks or cryptocurrencies.
“Over time, integrating with brokers will enable the 160 million Americans who own stock to access prediction markets,” Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Kalshi is committed to growing prediction markets into a trillion-dollar asset class — and we are not going to stop building until we do.”
It’s the latest evolution of prediction markets, which have been around for years but became more prominent in the 2024 election cycle, amid a global influx of bettors. Supporters of the platforms have said that they are more accurate than polls, driven by the wisdom of crowds and an ability to respond more quickly to breaking news. (It hasn’t always worked, making some big misses, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.)
Bettors also stand to win if they correctly predict outcomes. A French trader who bet heavily on a Trump victory via contracts on another platform, Polymarket, won $85 million.
The most prominent proof of concept was the 2024 presidential election, which showed Mr. Trump with better-than-a-coin-flip odds heading into Election Day. (Unlike polls, which measure how voters actually plan to act and mostly showed a dead heat, these markets track the odds that a candidate will win implied by bets on their platforms.)
Such markets also allow users to bet on a variety of other situations, including what will be the top Netflix show in the United States this week and whether ChatGPT or DeepSeek would be the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store this weekend.
Kalshi has 908 active contracts, according to the company, up from 290 in October and 691 on Election Day.
The rise of prediction markets has been accompanied by a series of legal victories as well. Kalshi became the first such company to permit U.S. bettors to participate on its platform, after a federal court allowed it to offer election-related contracts over the objection of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Other brokerages soon followed, with Interactive Brokers and Robinhood offering their own election-related betting contracts. Wall Street firms also began incorporating results from these platforms into its research.
Since then, Kalshi has seen about $2 billion in betting volume, and its app has been downloaded about two million times, according to the company.
Kalshi’s move to open its platform to other brokerages became possible earlier this month, when the C.F.T.C. lifted restrictions on the company’s ability to work with futures contract merchants.
That said, federal agents raided the home of Shayne Coplan, the chief executive of Polymarket, in November as part of an investigation into whether that company was running an unlicensed commodities exchange.
Prediction markets have increasingly benefited from favorable political winds as well. Mr. Trump had praised the platforms for reflecting higher odds of his winning in November, and Kalshi has since hired Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, as a strategic adviser. (The company described his hiring as part of its effort to “make event trading as commonplace and influential as traditional financial markets.”)
Kalshi and other prediction markets are likely to benefit from other moves by the Trump administration, including the appointment of Caroline Pham, a C.F.T.C. commissioner who criticized the agency’s effort to crack down on election betting, as acting chair of the regulator.
Legal experts have said that they expect the C.F.T.C. under Ms. Pham to drop litigation against Kalshi and instead pursue creating rules that would allow prediction markets to expand.
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