Market · research as of 9 August 2026Prediction markets got big. They got transparent at the same time.
Every figure below is dated and linked to its source, because numbers this large only help if they survive being checked. Nothing is modelled or rounded in our favour.
No Atrum numbers appear on this page. It is about the category, not about us.
~$500B
annual run rate, from the two majors alone
Kalshi and Polymarket cleared $41.8B combined in June 2026. Twelve months earlier the on-chain venue was doing about $1.2B a month. This category has gone up roughly twentyfold in a year, and every dollar of it trades in the open.
01
The category is enormous, and it is early
$31B
Kalshi monthly volume
A platform record, driven by the 2026 World Cup.
$25.7B
Polymarket monthly volume, peak
Up from roughly $1.2B a month through 2025.
1.29M
Polymarket wallets that traded
2–4M
Kalshi active monthly users
Company-reported. Third-party trackers put it as high as 5M.
$22B
Kalshi valuation
$1B Series F led by Coatue, with Sequoia, a16z, Paradigm and Morgan Stanley.
$20B
Polymarket target valuation
02
It got here in eighteen months
2025 → early 2026Polymarket monthly volume went from about $1.2B to more than $20B, with active wallets more than tripling in six months. CoinDesk Six months to mid-2026Kalshi institutional trading volume grew 800%. Institutions arriving is what changes who cares about being watched. SGI Europe By 2030Bernstein projects roughly $1 trillion in annual prediction-market volume, about an 80% CAGR from 2025. CNBC By 2030Macquarie models closer to $1.5 trillion in annual taker volume, from roughly $22B a year earlier — the same trajectory from a second independent house. Casino.org By 2030Citizens expects sector revenue to grow fivefold, to more than $10B a year. Bloomberg 03
A handful of wallets are the entire market
Millions of accounts, and the money sits with a few hundred of them. That concentration is the customer list.
0.55%
of profitable maker wallets took half of all gains
Dec 2025 – Feb 2026, politics markets ·
CoinDesk~3%
of traders drive most price discovery
academic analysis cited 2026 ·
Arkham$6.50
average trade size for the median user
The median user spent about $600 over six weeks. The volume is not coming from them — it comes from the cohort above.
04
And every one of them is being read in real time
This is not a theoretical exposure. It is tooled, funded, and shipped by the venues themselves — the best traders in the category are being farmed by their own order flow.
Copy-trading is an industry, not a hypothetical
The trading terminal Stand launched Polymarket copy-and-counter trading in February 2026 and had tracked over 1,500 wallets and 5,000 strategies within two months. Polymarket itself shipped a product called COPYCAT. Polymarket
Every order is public, including the cancellations
On the on-chain venue every limit order, market buy and cancellation is visible — which markets a profitable trader is entering, at what size, and when they leave. AlphaScope
Being followed costs the followed trader money
When enough people mirror one wallet, price moves the moment it trades. Sharp traders now split fills and route around trackers — a cat-and-mouse tax paid entirely by the person who had the edge. Tradox
05
When privacy is offered, capital moves fast
Nobody has offered it on a prediction market yet. Where it has been offered — on a liquid asset, at a real cost to the user — adoption went vertical.
11% → 30%
of Zcash supply moved into the shielded pool in one year
More growth than the previous eight years combined, and shielded coins are held longer once they are in.
59.3%
of Zcash transactions used shielding — an all-time high
~$80M
crossed into Zcash's new Ironwood pool on its first day
06
Where that lands for us
A named, reachable customer inside a category compounding at 80% a year — and no one is serving them.
CategoryRoughly $40B+ monthly across the two majors, mid-2026
Bernstein and Macquarie independently model $1T–1.5T annually by 2030 — two houses, the same trajectory.
AddressableCrypto-native, on-chain flow
The permissionless venue is where privacy can be offered as a protocol guarantee rather than a policy — and it is the half of the category compounding fastest.
The wedgeThe traders whose flow is worth copying
Under 1% of wallets take half the profits and about 3% drive price discovery. They are the cohort paying a measurable cost for transparency today, they know it, and they are already paying engineers to work around it.
The mechanism behind the claim is written up separately. How this stays private →