Prediction platform Kalshi has set a new personal best for trading activity twice on consecutive days.
Volume this past Saturday surpassed $260 million, topping the previous all-time Kalshi record from Election Day 2024 ($245 million). Sunday’s action was even heavier, with trades soaring above $275 million for the first time ever.
Kalshi’s growth coincides with increasing interest on sports contracts, which are currently legal to trade in all 50 US states pending litigation. Including the weekend’s results, NFL volume for this young season has already crossed $1 billion.
Football drives Kalshi growth
Of the $538 million traded on Kalshi over the weekend, 98% of volume involved sports contracts. More than 90% of that was related to football.
NCAA football generated $226 million in trades, including an Alabama–Georgia tilt that reached $23.4 million. Eight of the weekend’s college games drew eight-figure volume.
That was the case for the pros too, where eight of the Sunday NFL games generated at least $10 million in trading volume apiece. The Sunday Night Football overtime thriller between the Packers and the Cowboys became the top-traded game of all time at $57.2 million, the first-ever to reach $50 million on Kalshi. (Total volume for this game ultimately reached $67.7 million, with some action occurring after the day transition.)
For a sense of scale, an average NFL game generates around $60 million in straight betting handle across traditional state-regulated sportsbooks in the US. But remember: trading volume is not the same as sports betting handle.
Ryder Cup also popular for traders
Twenty-four of the top 25 events this past weekend involved football, with golf’s Ryder Cup as the lone exception.
Trading across all Ryder Cup contracts dating back to Friday’s opening session totaled $39.8 million, including $21.4 million on individual matches. Friday was the busiest of the three days, in fact, accounting for $15.5 million of the weekend’s total golf volume.
A relatively uncompetitive performance from the US may have stifled some of the interest on Saturday. The Ryder Cup was only the second-most traded golf event for Kalshi, trailing the St. Jude Classic from the first round of the FedEx Cup Playoffs last month.
Total golf trading for the year now sits just under $500 million, about 7% of the total platform volume over the same period.
If not for sports…
For as much as Kalshi tries to position itself as the place to trade on current events, sports continue to do nearly all of the heavy lifting.
Back in July, the company boasted that its first six months of sports trading had produced more than $2 billion in volume. That number has quickly become outdated, with more than $2.4 billion traded on sports in September alone. That represents 90% of the total volume for the month across the whole platform.
It is not difficult to spot the busy weekend days on a timeline chart:
Economic markets remain the second choice among traders, but volume in that category is less than one-tenth of sports volume and just 7% of the platform total – comparable to golf.
