The prediction markets industry is in its fastest growth phase ever. Kalshi — the CFTC-licensed US platform — is heading toward a public listing. Polymarket is consistently exceeding billion in monthly trading volume. High-profile investors including Donald Trump Jr are putting real money into the sector. Here are the biggest stories shaping the industry.
Kalshi is the only prediction market platform fully licensed by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — a rare designation that grants it the legal right to offer real-dollar event contracts in the United States. After years of accumulated investment and multiple funding rounds totaling hundreds of millions, Kalshi is now moving toward an IPO that analysts expect to value the company in the billions.
What makes Kalshi's story remarkable is that it didn't just get licensed — it defeated the US Department of Justice in a landmark legal battle that affirmed the right of prediction market platforms to offer genuine financial contracts. That victory set the legal precedent for the entire US industry.
According to multiple financial media reports, Donald Trump Jr invested over $300,000 in Kalshi ahead of its anticipated public listing. With the early valuations circulating in market reports, this stake could multiply into several million dollars post-IPO — making it simultaneously a personal financial bet and a political signal about the legitimacy of prediction markets.
The investment reflects growing confidence from US financial and political circles that prediction markets are a genuine new asset class — no longer trapped in the legal grey zone they occupied for years.
Polymarket — the decentralized platform built on the Polygon blockchain — has become the global reference point for anyone who wants to know "what does the market actually think?" In 2026, monthly trading volumes regularly exceed billion, concentrated around:
Polymarket has so far avoided US domestic regulation by operating via USDC — but its explosive growth is attracting regulatory attention from jurisdictions worldwide.
The past few years have seen an unprecedented wave of investment into the prediction market space:
Total disclosed investment in the industry over 2024–2026 has surpassed half a billion dollars — a clear signal that smart money sees prediction markets as a foundational infrastructure of the information economy.
Here is how the leading global platforms compare — and where PolySouq fits:
Regulation remains the most volatile frontier in this industry:
The numbers speak for themselves:
All of this activity is happening without meaningful Arab participation. GCC investors are watching from the sidelines as an industry grows at a breathtaking pace — with every platform in English, targeting Western markets.
This is exactly why PolySouq exists: the only Arabic prediction market platform that gives GCC investors a stake in this expanding industry — in their language, on their events, using the same prediction market mechanics that have proven themselves globally.
The opportunity is clear: the industry is in its infancy in the region, and early movers capture the highest returns.
On July 1, 2026, the mysterious Solana project World was unveiled as a fully onchain prediction market that runs directly inside the Phantom wallet and at world.xyz. The platform lets users trade event contracts tied to crypto prices and the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with markets on sports, geopolitics, and macroeconomics planned for the near future.
What sets World apart technically is its use of Chainlink oracles to auto-settle trades on Solana — meaning event outcomes are resolved through decentralized data feeds without a central operator. The launch reflects an accelerating industry trend:
This rapid global expansion confirms prediction markets are no longer a Western-only phenomenon — which is precisely where PolySouq steps in as the first Arab GCC alternative, giving regional investors a stake in the industry in their own language and on their own events.
In a move that underscores how fast the prediction-market industry is maturing, recent reports say Kalshi is in talks to raise a new funding round at a valuation of roughly $40 billion — nearly double the $22 billion valuation it reached just about seven weeks earlier in a billion Series F led by Coatue. Key takeaways from the reports:
The financing momentum comes alongside record operational growth, with Kalshi's monthly volume hitting all-time highs on the back of sports event contracts. According to the reports, an IPO remains unlikely before 2027 at the earliest.
A record valuation like this confirms prediction markets are a rising global industry — which is exactly where PolySouq, the first Arabic prediction market in the GCC, gives Gulf traders access to the sector through a fully Arabic, locally tuned platform.
On July 3, 2026, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) issued a statement warning that many prediction-market event contracts legally qualify as binary options under MiFID II — instruments that have been prohibited for retail investors across the EU since May 2018.
Key points from the warning:
In practice, this means Europe still has no licensed prediction market, and ESMA has raised the bar for any future launch. This regulatory contrast — openness in the US via the CFTC versus a clampdown in the EU via ESMA — highlights the value of PolySouq as a GCC alternative built from the ground up to serve Arab investors within their own local environment.
While Washington opens up to prediction markets through the federal CFTC, US states are waging a counter-battle. According to a report published by Forbes on July 1, 2026, monthly prediction-market trading volume surged to roughly $24 billion in April 2026 — up from less than $5 billion in September 2025 — nearly five times the growth of legalized US sports betting, which runs at about
That explosive growth has triggered state-level regulatory pushback, since operators lean on their federal license to bypass local gambling laws:
This split between federal openness and state-level clampdown exposes how fragile the Western regulatory landscape remains despite the sheer scale of trading volumes. That is precisely where PolySouq stands out as the first GCC prediction market built from the ground up to serve Arab investors within their own local environment, away from this legal tangle.
In a move that underlines how quickly prediction markets are being pulled into mainstream financial regulation, Polymarket has applied for a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) licence in the United States through its affiliate Coming Home GBA LLC, according to a Bloomberg report. The application stems from a 3 July 2026 filing with the National Futures Association (NFA).
The stated goal is to offer margin trading on event contracts in the US market, letting traders open positions with less capital upfront in exchange for additional obligations. The industry reads this as an explicit attempt to court professional and institutional investors rather than retail traders alone.
What matters most in this filing:
The deeper signal is that prediction markets are shifting from being event-speculation venues into financial infrastructure governed by the same brokerage licences that apply to traditional derivatives. For GCC traders, PolySouq remains the closest alternative: the first Arabic prediction market in the Gulf, fully in Arabic and without the complexity of US licensing regimes or the risks of margin trading.
The 2026 World Cup has become the single biggest driver of trading volume in the history of prediction markets. According to a Yahoo Finance report published on 6 July 2026, global platforms have posted record after record since the tournament kicked off on 11 June.
Sports is now the largest category in prediction markets, overtaking the political and economic events that once dominated — proof that public appetite for forecasting major sporting events is the fuel behind today's growth.
This is exactly where PolySouq steps in: the first Arabic prediction market in the GCC, letting Arab investors forecast World Cup events and more in their own language and region — instead of watching this record growth from the sidelines on Western platforms.
In a shift that moves the fight over prediction markets from regulators to Big Tech platforms, Google has updated its Chrome Web Store policy to prohibit any extension that facilitates or enables real-money transactions on predicted outcomes. The update states plainly that "Extensions that facilitate or enable real money transactions on predictive outcomes are not allowed", per the policy language cited from Google.
The ban takes effect on August 1, 2026, giving developers a short window to remove or rework tools that connect users directly to platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket.
The key takeaways:
The deeper signal is that compliance pressure on prediction markets is no longer confined to financial regulators — it now reaches the digital distribution gateways that millions of users pass through. Against this tightening backdrop in Western markets, PolySouq stands out as the natural choice for GCC traders: the first Arabic prediction market in the Gulf, fully Arabic and built on locally relevant events, away from the constraints of US platforms.
In a move that reflects the maturing of the prediction-markets industry and its shift toward professional traders, Kalshi — the largest CFTC-regulated prediction market — has launched a new professional-grade product called "Kalshi Pro", a desktop trading platform built for high-volume traders and quantitative (quant) trading firms. According to a Cryptopolitan report, the platform launched in beta, is available for free, and uses the same account and balance as Kalshi's standard app.
Kalshi Pro targets the "sharps" who trade simultaneously across many markets, and ships with an advanced toolset:
The numbers underline the scale of the shift: Kalshi's annual trading volume has tripled to 78 billion, driven by heavy activity from quant firms, and Kalshi recently became the first US platform to offer crypto perpetual futures under CFTC supervision — reaching
On the regulatory side, the pressure has not eased: Italy's Customs and Monopolies Agency (ADM) has blocked Polymarket for the second time, adding it to the official list of blocked addresses for violating Italian gambling laws and lacking local authorization — after first blocking it in October 2025, a decision that was reversed in December 2025 following a court challenge.
Together, these developments capture the industry's two faces: deeper professionalization in the US versus tighter regulation in Europe — opening the door for regulated local solutions tailored to GCC traders, such as PolySouq, the first Arabic prediction market in the Gulf, offering a prediction-trading experience in Arabic within a framework suited to the region.
On July 14, 2026, Kalshi launched Compute Forward Curves, a new pricing benchmark that shows the implied future price of renting the GPU capacity that powers artificial intelligence models. The move pushes the exchange beyond political and sports contracts into pricing one of the digital economy's most critical commodities.
According to Bloomberg and The Next Web, here is how it works:
The launch targets two sides of a fast-growing market: infrastructure providers (data centers, neoclouds and hyperscalers) that want to price and hedge their capacity, and the much larger pool of buyers — training and inference labs and any compute-heavy company — who can now lock in prices months ahead instead of absorbing sudden hikes. Strategically, rivals such as CME and ICE are building traditional futures that require complex regulatory approval, while Kalshi leverages its existing prediction-market framework to get to market first, positioning itself as "the exchange for the AI economy."
This expansion from sports and politics into pricing compute confirms that prediction markets are maturing into serious financial infrastructure for price discovery — exactly what PolySouq is building in Arabic as the trusted GCC alternative for traders in the region.
On July 14, 2026, the ERShares XOVR ETF — a Nasdaq-listed crossover fund that blends private-company holdings with public innovation leaders in a single vehicle — allocated roughly $30 million to Kalshi as part of a fund rebalance, making it one of its largest private positions. According to Fintech Global, the move gives retail investors indirect exposure to prediction-market infrastructure through a vehicle they can trade on the public market.
Why this deal stands out:
The deal confirms that investor appetite for prediction markets now reaches beyond venture capital into the public markets — which is exactly where PolySouq comes in as the first Arab prediction market in the GCC, giving local investors a stake in this rising industry in their own language and on the events that matter to them.
On July 16, 2026, Fortune reported that New York–based prediction-market startup Pascal raised $9 million in a Series A round led by Union Square Ventures, stepping directly into competition with heavyweights Kalshi and Polymarket. The round follows a $6 million seed in August led by Wintermute Ventures and DBA.
What sets Pascal apart is that it does not target casual bettors — it courts professional traders and institutions through a hybrid model blending traditional prediction markets with perpetual futures. The platform's core promises:
Behind the platform are two founders with heavy quantitative-trading pedigrees: Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen (former CEO of crypto exchange dYdX and a former quant at Bridgewater) and Matthew Downey (a high-frequency trading background). Pascal launched in June 2026 and remains in private beta, while Polymarket is valued near 5 billion and Kalshi near $22 billion.
A well-funded new entrant backed by top-tier funds confirms that prediction markets are becoming serious financial infrastructure attracting the best quant-trading minds — which is exactly where PolySouq comes in as the first Arab prediction market in the GCC, giving local investors a stake in this rising industry in their own language and on the events that matter to them.
On July 16, 2026, CNN and NPR reported that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating the operator of President Donald Trump's teleprompter for insider trading on Kalshi. The operator allegedly used advance access to the president's prepared remarks to bet on "mention markets" — contracts that let users wager on which words and phrases a public figure will say in a speech.
These scandals have triggered the broadest regulatory push yet: the House Oversight Committee under Chairman James Comer opened an investigation into Kalshi and Polymarket, the Senate passed a resolution barring its members from trading on the platforms, and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Dave McCormick introduced the bipartisan Prediction Market Act of 2026, which would bar members of Congress, the president, the vice president, and senior executive-branch officials from trading on prediction markets.
The crisis exposes the dark side of wagering real money on political events — which is exactly where PolySouq differs fundamentally: it runs as a real-money prediction market where your own capital is at stake, keeping it entirely clear of the insider-trading and abuse-of-access risks now dogging the Western platforms.
On 16 July 2026, Kalshi launched a pilot programme extending prediction markets into an entirely new sector: biotech and pharmaceuticals. The exchange listed 13 new contracts in partnership with pharmaceutical intelligence firm AppliedXL, allowing traders to take positions on clinical trial outcomes and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decisions — including contracts on potential approvals for drugs from companies such as Sanofi and Gilead Sciences, according to Bloomberg.
The significance goes beyond adding an asset class: for the first time, the odds of drug-development success are publicly and continuously priced in an industry where such estimates were long the preserve of institutional analysts and specialist hedge funds.
Despite those safeguards, doctors and researchers have voiced serious reservations — as reported by STAT News — centred on the risk of trading on non-public information and on the possibility that an open market could influence the behaviour of participants and researchers, and therefore the integrity of studies whose results can carry life-or-death consequences for patients.
The takeaway: Kalshi is testing the outer limits of what prediction markets can price, moving them from political and sporting events into the heart of scientific and regulatory decision-making. As the industry expands globally into new sectors, PolySouq remains the Arabic gateway that lets GCC investors enter this world in their own language and on the events that matter to them.
The World Cup betting frenzy peaked with the final itself. According to a Fortune report on 17 July 2026, the Argentina vs Spain final contract surpassed .27 billion in trading volume, making it the single largest market in the history of prediction platforms — outstripping any political or sporting contract before it.
This historic record confirms that predicting major sporting events is the industry's growth engine today — and this is exactly where PolySouq comes in: the first Arab prediction market in the GCC, letting Arab traders predict World Cup and other events in their own language and from their own region, rather than watching these record numbers from afar on Western platforms.
For more than three decades, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been the sole federal regulator of event contracts in the United States, dating back to its landmark 1992 ruling on the Iowa Electronic Markets. But as trading volumes surge, legal experts now increasingly expect the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to step in — a development that could reshape the entire industry's regulatory map, according to a CNBC report published on July 16, 2026.
Polymarket confirmed to CNBC that it has already engaged with both the CFTC and the SEC over definitional frameworks for prediction market products, while rival Kalshi declined to comment.
The crux of the dispute lies in how the new contracts are defined:
Jeff Le Riche, a partner at Husch Blackwell and a former CFTC chief trial attorney, described the situation as "really a jump ball." Notably, the two agencies jointly requested public comment last month to clarify the line between "swaps" and "event contracts," potentially expanding the SEC's oversight going forward.
This growing web of regulators reflects both the scale and the sensitivity of the industry — and underscores the value of a transparent, responsibly designed Arabic platform like PolySouq, the first GCC alternative for prediction markets in the region.
The rise of prediction markets is no longer just a spike in trading volume — it is now a real redistribution of market share away from traditional sportsbooks. According to H2 Gambling Capital estimates published by Fortune on 19 July 2026, prediction markets captured 27% of all legal US sports-betting volume during the first month of the World Cup, up from roughly 9% at the start of the year.
The key features of this shift:
Ed Birkin of H2 Gambling Capital said prediction markets "have had a very good World Cup" and are eating into sportsbook share, while cautioning that they may serve a different and potentially less lucrative audience.
The deeper signal is that prediction markets are no longer a niche product but a mainstream pricing channel for sporting and economic events alike — the same shift PolySouq is built on as the first Arabic prediction market in the GCC, letting Arab users trade events in their own language and region.
The biggest Gulf story in prediction markets this year did not come out of New York — it came out of Abu Dhabi. ADI Predictstreet is the Official Prediction Market Partner of the FIFA World Cup 2026, operating under the business empire of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's national security adviser and brother of the country's president, whose group oversees assets estimated at more than .3 trillion.
On 26 June 2026, ADI Predictstreet and Kalshi announced a strategic branding and product partnership covering:
The shrewdest part of the deal is that it is not a direct FIFA partnership. ADI reportedly paid around 50 million to become FIFA's official partner — a price both Kalshi and Polymarket had walked away from. By contracting with ADI rather than FIFA, Kalshi bought an official tournament presence at a fraction of the cost.
The volume numbers tell the other half of the story. Per Front Office Sports, ADI's tournament-winner market had traded roughly $57,000 by mid-tournament, against about $3 billion on Polymarket and some $6.7 billion in total volume on Kalshi. The platform is regulated only in Gibraltar, faces German scrutiny over whether its marketing breaches gambling law, and was criticised for leaving some markets open after their outcomes were already decided.
The lesson is clear: official sponsorship and capital alone do not create a prediction market — liquidity, user trust and a trading experience genuinely built for its audience do. That is the ground PolySouq is built on as the first Arabic prediction market in the GCC: an Arabic-language platform with markets that matter to Gulf users, not just a logo on a billboard.
Federal disclosures filed this week revealed that Kalshi, the largest US prediction-market platform, spent $990,000 on direct lobbying in the first half of 2026 alone — nearly what it spent in all of 2025. Counting outside firms, the total climbs to about .8 million, a record six-month figure, using seven lobbying firms. By contrast, the single firm lobbying for Polymarket spent just 80,000.
The traditional gaming industry is matching the effort. The American Gaming Association raised its spend to .39 million, up 30% year over year, bringing its total advocacy outlay close to Kalshi's at roughly
Details of the disclosures are covered in reporting by CNBC and analysis from NOTUS.
While millions are spent fighting regulatory battles in Washington, PolySouq offers Gulf traders the first Arabic, purpose-built prediction market for the region — clear of this legal ambiguity.
July 2026 has brought an unprecedented legislative escalation against US prediction markets. The chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) testified before a House panel amid rising scrutiny, while a stack of bipartisan bills piled up in Congress that could redraw the industry's boundaries or ban its flagship products outright.
The escalation follows the CFTC's June 10, 2026 proposed rule distinguishing prediction markets from pure games of chance. Even so, analysts see the odds of any of these bills passing as low for now, since a portion of lawmakers prefer to let the industry keep growing without hard limits.
More detail via Senator Curtis's official release, analysis from Covers, and the Congress.gov briefing.
While the legality of prediction contracts is decided in the halls of the US Congress, PolySouq gives Gulf traders a regulated, region-built Arabic alternative clear of this legislative turmoil.
On July 24, 2026, the Division of Market Oversight at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued new guidance curbing the self-certification practice that prediction market platforms rely on to list their contracts. Staff said they had observed firms self-certifying broad, template event contracts that bundle dozens of possible permutations with differing settlement sources and methodologies under a single certification — a practice that limits the regulator's ability to review whether each contract meets requirements, chief among them protection against market manipulation.
The move extends a wider regulatory arc that began with the CFTC's June 2026 proposed rule distinguishing prediction markets from gambling — oversight is shifting from whether these contracts are allowed to how they are allowed to be listed. More detail via Bloomberg, the Gibson Dunn weekly regulatory update, and Investing.com.
While US regulators rewrite the rules for how prediction contracts get listed, PolySouq continues to offer the first Arabic prediction market built for the GCC, with clear rules and events that matter to Arab traders.
On July 25, 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that Robinhood is in talks with Crypto.com to carry the latter's event contracts on its platform — a move that marks a shift in how the prediction markets industry competes: from a race for exchange licences to a race for distribution and direct access to traders.
The significance runs deeper than the deal itself: once the broker's front end becomes the real battleground, a regulated exchange turns into an interchangeable liquidity supplier — a shift that compresses fees and breaks any single platform's grip on the trader base. More detail via The Block, crypto.news, and Investing.com.
As the US race turns into a distribution fight between large brokers, PolySouq remains the first Arabic prediction market bringing these contracts to GCC traders in their own language and on an interface built for the region.
On July 26, 2026, Netflix premiered “Instadocs: The Prediction Games” as part of its fast-turnaround documentary series, making it the first mass-market film to put prediction markets in front of tens of millions of viewers worldwide. The release was preceded by a legal clash: Kalshi sent Netflix a formal cease-and-desist letter demanding the removal of the film's trailer.
The significance runs deeper than the dispute itself: when an emerging industry reaches the world's largest entertainment screen, it stops being a niche financial product and becomes a cultural phenomenon whose public image is formed before its regulatory framework is finished — which explains why platforms are so sensitive about how they are portrayed. More via TechCrunch, The Hill, and Netflix Tudum.
As the world meets prediction markets through a Netflix screen, PolySouq gives GCC traders the Arabic-language alternative built for the region's own events.
On 27 July 2026, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez of the District of Minnesota granted a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of the state law that criminalised operating prediction markets — just days before it was due to take effect on 1 August 2026. It is the industry's most significant courtroom win yet against the wave of state-level curbs.
Why it matters: the ruling cuts in the opposite direction to an earlier New York decision that denied Kalshi's bid to block state gambling laws — confirming that the federal-versus-state jurisdictional fight is far from settled, and that it will be resolved contract-by-contract rather than by blanket bans. The CFTC standing alongside the platforms as a co-plaintiff also gives the industry an unprecedented layer of federal cover. The case now proceeds toward a final judgment on the merits.
While U.S. courts keep trading jurisdiction over these markets back and forth, PolySouq remains the GCC alternative — giving Arab traders direct access to prediction markets in their own language and from their own region, without the state-by-state legal maze.
On July 29, 2026, Bloomberg Businessweek published a wide-ranging investigation concluding that prediction markets — marketed as the most accurate "truth serum" for political forecasting — are vulnerable to distortion at surprisingly low cost, especially in thinly traded political and geopolitical contracts.
Industry and regulatory response: the CFTC issued guidance on March 12, 2026 directing platforms to consult regulators on manipulation and insider-trading vulnerabilities. Polymarket says it has referred nearly 100 suspicious wallets to law enforcement, while Kalshi has banned entire categories of participants — including politicians and athletes — from trading contracts tied to their own fields.
Why it matters: the entire value of a prediction market rests on one premise — that the price reflects a real probability. When $44,000 is enough to manufacture a misleading number that the press then repeats as "what the market expects," the battleground shifts from legal legitimacy to pricing integrity and liquidity depth — the standards that will separate serious platforms from the rest in the next phase.
As liquidity depth and pricing quality become the industry's primary trust metric, PolySouq is building the GCC alternative — prediction markets for Arab traders in their own language and from their own region, built on public, verifiable events.
At midnight on July 27, 2026, the public comment period formally closed on the first proposed rule in the history of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) governing prediction markets — a 267-page notice issued on June 10, 2026 and aimed squarely at sports event contracts. What landed on the agency's docket was not technical feedback but a three-front assault whose participants disagree on almost everything except that the text cannot stand as written.
Why this is pivotal: the rule is the first federal attempt to codify sports event contracts rather than leave them to court-by-court interpretation. Its outcome decides whether the industry gets a single federal umbrella or is pushed into fifty conflicting state regimes. The fight arrives while the CFTC is itself suing nine states to defend its exclusive jurisdiction, and just days after a federal judge froze Minnesota's ban. The final call rests with the Commission, with no set deadline.
While Washington tries to reconcile states, sports leagues and platforms inside a single regulatory text, PolySouq keeps building the GCC alternative — prediction markets for Arab traders in their own language and from their own region, outside that jurisdictional tug-of-war.
On July 27, 2026, Fanatics — the U.S. sports commerce and merchandise giant — announced an agreement to acquire Water Street Labs and CX Clearinghouse from BGC Group, a deal that moves the company from renting regulated infrastructure to owning it. Financial terms were not disclosed.
What America's distribution giants are building today are fully owned, locally licensed prediction markets — the same logic behind PolySouq, the first Arabic prediction market built for the Gulf, its language and its events.
On July 31, 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a lawsuit against KalshiEX LLC for allegedly running an unlicensed gambling operation in the state. This is the heaviest enforcement step so far, because it comes from the largest financial state in the United States rather than a peripheral one.
Kalshi’s answer is the same one it has used in every prior fight: it is a federally registered entity under the CFTC, and its regulation is exclusively federal, leaving states without jurisdiction. But the timing is unusually harsh: on July 29, 2026 a federal judge denied the CFTC’s request for a preliminary injunction blocking Wisconsin from enforcing its gambling laws against sports event contracts — a ruling that leaves platforms exposed to state enforcement despite their federal registration.
Why this matters to Gulf readers: the fight is no longer about whether prediction markets are legitimate — it is about who has the right to license them: the federal regulator, or each state separately. That fragmentation — more than thirty active lawsuits and 18 states imposing bans or restrictions — means a U.S. user may find a platform available today and blocked tomorrow depending on their address. By contrast, PolySouq is being built from day one as an Arabic-first platform with clear boundaries — the first Arab prediction market in the GCC, speaking to Arab users in their own language under rules they can actually read, instead of waiting for Washington’s jurisdictional battles to settle — start with PolySouq.
On 29 July 2026, Nasdaq-listed Robinhood Markets reported its second-quarter 2026 results, and they contained what may be the single most consequential number the industry has produced so far: event contracts (prediction markets) generated more revenue than crypto trading for the first time in the company's history.
Why this number matters more than the others. Most of the headline figures in this industry come from privately held companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket, whose self-reported volumes are difficult to verify independently. Robinhood is a publicly listed company reporting audited results under SEC oversight. That moves prediction markets from a trading fad to a proven, disclosed revenue line on a major retail broker's income statement — something regulators and competitors cannot easily dismiss.
The figure also points to a genuine shift in retail trading behaviour: liquidity that once flowed into crypto speculation is moving toward contracts tied to clearly defined, resolvable events, which give traders a shorter time horizon and a risk that is defined in advance rather than open-ended volatility.
This global shift makes the case for an Arabic gateway to prediction markets clearer than ever — which is exactly what PolySouq offers as the GCC's first Arabic prediction market, traded with real USDC that users deposit themselves.
The industry is surging — your stake starts here
While capital floods into Kalshi and Polymarket, PolySouq is your entry point to this booming industry — in Arabic, on the events that matter to you directly.
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Reports indicate Kalshi is preparing for a public market listing after successfully obtaining its CFTC license and winning its legal battles. No confirmed date has been announced, but valuations discussed in the market suggest a multi-billion dollar listing.
According to available reports, Trump Jr sees Kalshi as an exceptional growth opportunity in a fully licensed, legally recognized sector in the United States. The investment followed Kalshi's landmark legal victory over the Department of Justice, which cemented the legitimacy of its operations.
Kalshi is a regulated, CFTC-licensed platform operating in real US dollars. Polymarket is decentralized, running on the Polygon blockchain with USDC, without central regulatory licensing — giving it more flexibility but with potential regulatory risk.
Yes. PolySouq is the Arabic GCC-focused prediction market platform. Western platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi are technically accessible but are English-only and crypto-dependent. PolySouq offers the same experience in Arabic with Gulf-focused and local markets.
Disclaimer: Prediction markets are a legal and legitimate way to trade information about the outcomes of future events. However, trading carries risk and you may lose the full amount you trade — so only trade what you can afford to lose. This content is educational and is not financial or investment advice.