Kalshi Scores World Cup Branding Deal as Weekly Volume Hits $14.5B

Kalshi secured a significant piece of World Cup marketing real estate on Friday without becoming an official FIFA partner. The exchange announced a strategic branding and product deal with ADI Predictstreet, a Gibraltar-licensed prediction market that holds the official FIFA prediction market sponsorship for the 2026 tournament. Kalshi's branding will appear alongside ADI Predictstreet's in stadium, TV and online placements heading into the knockout rounds, giving the exchange exposure at the world's largest sporting event at a fraction of what that status would normally cost.

The price tag for ADI's original FIFA partnership was reported by Bloomberg at around $150 million. Kalshi and Polymarket had previously been in the running for that deal but both declined at that cost, according to sources cited by Front Office Sports. The ADI partnership gives Kalshi the branding access without the direct fee, a structure that also includes longer-term plans for Kalshi to support market expansion across ADI's international footprint and explore infrastructure integrations on ADI Chain.

Weekly Volumes Hit $14.5 Billion as World Cup Drives Prediction Market Records

The deal lands in the middle of the strongest stretch the prediction market sector has ever recorded. A blog post from Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in both Kalshi and Robinhood, reported that weekly trading volumes across prediction markets hit $14.5 billion last week, the first time the category has crossed that level. Outstanding bets reached $1.6 billion, a record for the third straight week.

Kalshi is the clear beneficiary of the World Cup surge. The exchange told reporters it had crossed $1 billion in a single day of trading during the tournament, and Bank of America estimated total World Cup volume on Kalshi could reach $12 billion to $13 billion by the time the final whistle blows. The exchange holds roughly 90% of regulated US prediction market share, according to Bank of America. Polymarket sits at 28% of total weekly volume including unregulated markets, with all volume data tracked by Artemis. For context on where Kalshi's valuation and broader ambitions stand ahead of a potential public listing, see our coverage of its IPO talks.

DraftKings Launches DKeX as the World Cup Pulls Traditional Sports Betting Into Prediction Markets

The competition is intensifying beyond just Kalshi and Polymarket. DraftKings announced the launch of DKeX, its own proprietary prediction market exchange, on Friday, citing the World Cup as a catalyst. The company expects its DraftKings Predictions product to grow throughout July as tournament activity peaks. Robinhood's exchange routing partner, Rothera, has seen weekly volumes explode from $2.1 million to $805 million since Robinhood began routing wagers there in late May, suggesting the mainstream brokerage channel is becoming a meaningful driver of prediction market growth alongside specialist platforms.

The marketing race is accelerating in parallel with the trading volumes. Polymarket has aired ads featuring American rapper Future, while Kalshi has signed Luka Modric of Croatia, Giannis Antetokounmpo of the NBA and the Argentine Football Association. The pattern is familiar from the early days of sports betting legalisation in the US, when operators spent aggressively on brand awareness to capture the first wave of new users. Prediction markets appear to be entering the same phase, with the World Cup providing the audience and the regulatory clearance secured in 2025 providing the runway. Whether the platforms can retain that audience after the final whistle is the harder question, and it is one that Bernstein analysts have flagged as the defining test of whether this is a watershed moment or a temporary spike.