Kalshi Holds 89% of US Prediction Market as Binance Enters the Race
Kalshi now controls 89% of tracked U.S. prediction market trading volume, according to Bank of America data published this week, as a pair of federal lawsuits and a landmark appellate ruling reshape the regulatory terrain beneath the entire sector. Overall weekly volume climbed 4%, with Kalshi posting 6% growth while Polymarket dropped 16% in the same period. The market-share split now reads Kalshi at 89%, Polymarket at 7%, and Crypto.com at 4%.
Federal Courts Push Back Against State Enforcement
The concentration of volume at Kalshi is not accidental: it reflects a direct consequence of the platform’s CFTC-registered status versus Polymarket's blockchain-native model, which has historically operated outside U.S. regulatory frameworks. On April 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a 2-1 ruling preventing New Jersey gaming authorities from enforcing state gambling laws against Kalshi, finding that its contracts qualify as “swaps” under the Commodity Exchange Act. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour called it “a big win for the industry.” The dissenting judge, however, described the platform’s structure as “a performative sleight meant to obscure the reality that Kalshi’s products are sports gambling,” a framing that courts in Nevada, Ohio, and Maryland have each found persuasive in separate rulings against the platform.
As we covered when the CFTC and DOJ filed coordinated lawsuits against Illinois, Connecticut, and Arizona on April 2, federal regulators are pressing hard to establish exclusive jurisdiction before state-level enforcement becomes entrenched. Arizona escalated further by filing criminal charges against Kalshi, the first criminal prosecution of a CFTC-registered entity on record, with an arraignment scheduled for April 13. The DOJ and CFTC are now seeking a temporary restraining order to block that proceeding, warning that a patchwork of 50 state regulations would fragment liquidity and undermine Congressional intent to centralize oversight of derivatives markets.
Bitcoin BTC$77,253.00▲1.44%
Ethereum ETH$2,107.85▲1.87%
Tether USDT$0.9991▲0.03%
BNB BNB$661.36▲1.72%
XRP XRP$1.35▲1.36%
USDC USDC$0.9998▲0.01%
Solana SOL$85.32▲1.47%
TRON TRX$0.3714▲1.93%
Figure Heloc FIGR_HELOC$1.03▲0.00%
Dogecoin DOGE$0.1023▲1.42%Binance Enters With Zero-Fee On-Chain Integration
While that legal contest plays out, Binance moved on April 9 to claim its own slice of a market that now generates over $20 billion in monthly volume, up from $1.2 billion in early 2025. The exchange integrated prediction markets directly into Binance Wallet through a partnership with Predict.fun, running on BNB Smart Chain with all trading and settlement fees sponsored by Binance. The platform uses multi-party computation technology to generate keyless wallets, lowering the onboarding barrier for users more accustomed to centralized exchange interfaces. Binance is not acting as market counterparty, and the service operates outside the supervision of any financial regulatory authority.
The entry of an exchange at Binance’s scale, alongside Coinbase’s earlier partnership with Kalshi and Crypto.com’s standalone platform launch, signals that prediction markets have crossed from niche curiosity into contested institutional territory. The infrastructure question is now mostly settled: these markets can scale. The open question is whether federal regulators can secure the jurisdictional clarity needed to let them do so uniformly. A CFTC public comment window on proposed prediction market rulemaking remains open through the end of April, and the outcome of that process, combined with the pending appellate and criminal proceedings, will determine whether the next phase of this market builds on a coherent federal foundation or fractures along state lines. The architecture for a mature, federally regulated prediction market exists. The political will to fully commit to it is still being tested.
