FIFA World Cup predictions have become the biggest business in prediction markets. Polymarket’s tournament-winning market alone has $2 billion in bets, while Kalshi runs 48 markets on the same question and racks up the industry’s largest fees.
The two platforms agree on football but share the money in very different ways. BeInCrypto’s Dune dashboards display in three places the location of volume bets, fees, and residuals for cryptocurrency bets.
Sports had a record-breaking month in May for prediction markets
According to Binance Research accounting, prediction markets generated a record $31.2 billion in May, up nearly 15% from January. The same report puts Calchi at 58% of this flow and Polymarket at 28%, with open interest for the industry reaching $1.3 billion.
BeInCrypto’s own data shows what filled Kalshi’s stake. In the platform’s biggest month of 2026, May, sports trading volume reached $10.44 billion.
Elections, the category that made Calcio famous, only managed $173.66 million that month, about 60 times less.
Cryptocurrency markets generated $2.02 billion on Kalshi in the same period, while the sports-adjacent group of exotic currencies added an additional $4.88 billion. The pattern suggests that it is the 2026 World Cup calendar, not politics or currency rates, that is now fueling the platform’s growth.
Note: All weekly data points have been condensed into monthly data points.
June already sees sport leading the way. With almost the entire World Cup looming, that number could rise. It is worth noting that the election category in Calci is already approaching its levels in May. Thus, this category may steal some sporting thunder.
Football’s biggest market shows just how focused this engine is.
One $2 billion market versus 48 smaller markets
Polymarket’s World Cup winner’s market is worth $2 billion In terms of lifetime volume, $436 million is in liquidity, and $137 million was traded on Thursday alone. The platform’s FIFA World Cup section spans over 330 active markets.
The equivalent Kalshi event grossed $182.3 million in 48 markets. On the largest listed events, the gap is about 11 to 1 in Polymarket’s favour, and Thursday’s influx on Polymarket alone approached the standing size of the largest World Cup listed event on Kalshi.
The places are different around the structure and not around the football. Both books price the World Cup odds identically, with Spain being favorites at exactly 17%, and Calcio paying 5.56x on both Spain and France.
Kalshi’s spreads stream across dozens of match-level books while Polymarket aggregates them into a single tournament-level market. Kalshi still garners more total volume across the platform, according to Binance Research’s 58% share, so the competition is broad versus deep rather than large versus small.
This focus is evident throughout Polymarket’s entire year.
She has led Polymarket sports all year, and she is fantastic
Sports topped every weekly category on Polymarket in 2026. January saw sports worth $6.20 billion, or 43% of the total $14.34 billion, ahead of politics at $4.49 billion and cryptocurrencies at $3.65 billion.
Note: All weekly data points have been condensed into monthly data points.
The peak came in March, when the sport generated $8.77 billion from a record $19.58 billion in a single month. By June of this year, the total had fallen by about 70% to $5.91 billion, yet sports’ share had risen to 56.5%. Cryptocurrencies held $1.73 billion and the policy was reduced to $831.25 million.
In other words, football’s dominance is not the championship’s creation. It precedes World Cup buzzAnd it gets deeper even with the decline in overall activity in the group stage.
Size tells half the story. The fees say the rest.
“Kalshi” bears the fees, and the opinion shows the end of the game
In May, Calci collected $137.86 million in trading fees, compared to $28.07 million for Polymarket and $159,330 for Opinion. This represents a revenue gap of approximately five to one, which is consistent with Binance Research’s findings that Kalshi clears the most volume.
The dashboard tracks Kalshi’s fees from April onwards, and both tracked months are well above anything Polymarket has earned. So the betting money is split two ways, but the fee money flows overwhelmingly to Calcci.
The view of the smaller venue shows where this trend ends. In January, cryptocurrencies led the platform with $729.52 million out of $1.46 billion in the week.
Note: All weekly data points have been condensed into monthly data points.
By the week of June 1, sports accounted for 99.4% of the activity, while cryptocurrencies fell below $500,000. Not only have expectations of the FIFA World Cup grown there; They have replaced the categories on which prediction markets were built.
The surprises are piling up. Sports have now overtaken cryptocurrencies everywhere it’s tracked, including crypto-based venues, and politics has collapsed to a rounding error just a year into the industry’s success.
the The platforms completely agree on football, Both pricing Spain. What is even more surprising is that May reached a record high while overall activity was already cooling down.
What happens next will determine the race of FIFA World Cup predictions. Daily matches in the group stage favor a match-level structure, while the knockout drama should feed into Polymarket’s deep pool of tournaments, so the lead may change week by week.
Traders should watch whether the start revives overall volume, whether the rebounding election category regains share of the sport, and whether open interest continues to build in the knockout.
If the group stage cannot reverse the slowdown, the expected market boom will have peaked before the kick-off whistle.
this post Polymarket vs Kalshi: Where do fans place their FIFA World Cup predictions? appeared first on BeInCrypto.
