In October 2024, a US court ruled that a platform called Kalshi could legally let people bet on election outcomes. Kalshi resumed operations shortly thereafter. Roughly a month later, its odds on the US presidential election turned out to be more accurate than almost every major poll in the country.

That moment cracked something open.

Prediction markets, which let anyone put real money behind a yes-or-no answer to a question about the future, had existed for years. They were niche. They were associated with crypto. They were mostly used by people betting on politics between elections and sports between seasons.

Then the volume numbers started moving in a direction that nobody in media or finance had prepared for.

In early 2025, Polymarket, the largest prediction market platform, processed about $1.2 billion in monthly trades. By March 2026, that number was $25.7 billion. Active users on the platform more than tripled in six months. The platform’s single-day record, set in February 2026, was $425 million, beating the previous record set on US Election Day 2024.

These are not small numbers. They are the kind of numbers that get noticed in boardrooms and newsrooms.

The users are not who you think

The instinct when you hear “crypto gambling platform” is to picture a small group of heavy bettors moving large amounts of money. That picture is wrong.

Roughly 82% of Polymarket users in the first quarter of 2026 traded less than $10,000 across the entire quarter. The most common trade size was $35. Not $35,000. Thirty-five dollars.

The platform is not being driven by a handful of large players. It is being driven by over a million wallets, mostly small, mostly retail, collectively aggregating into something that behaves like a live, constantly-updated probability forecast on almost every significant event happening in the world.

Oil prices. Central bank rate decisions. Geopolitical escalations. Corporate earnings. Election outcomes. Whether a specific piece of legislation will pass. Whether a specific leader will still be in office by a given date.

Every one of those markets has a live price. That price reflects the collective judgment of people putting real money behind their view, updated in real time as new information arrives.

Why this is not a gambling story

Polls ask people what they think. Nobody loses money if they are wrong.

Prediction markets ask people to bet on what they think. The price you see reflects the actual risk appetite of participants. When new information hits, prices move before official sources confirm anything. During the Iran-related geopolitical events in early 2026, Polymarket volumes on specific outcomes spiked thousands of percent in a single day as traders rushed to reprice the situation in real time.

Television analysts have opinions. They do not have skin in the game. A market participant who bets $10,000 that something will happen has a very different relationship with being right than a commentator who moves on to the next segment regardless of the outcome.

This is why prediction market prices are starting to show up in financial journalism and political reporting alongside traditional data. The Bloomberg terminal shows you historical prices. Polymarket shows you what the market thinks happens next, right now, priced by people with something to lose if they are wrong.

The pattern under the surface

Here is the part that matters for anyone thinking about where information markets are heading.

Users who start on these platforms tend to start on crypto-related questions. Bitcoin price by year end. Which blockchain project survives. That is the familiar territory that brings them in.

But as users become more active, their behaviour shifts. Crypto questions drop. Sports questions grow. Political questions hold steady. Real-world macroeconomic questions grow fastest among the most engaged users.

Crypto was the door. The room behind it is something much larger.

A platform that started as a place to bet on token prices is evolving into infrastructure for real-time probabilistic reasoning about the world. The same technology. A very different function.

The thing worth watching

Polymarket’s projections for 2026 put total annual volume at $240 billion. The longer-term projection is $1 trillion.

To put that in context: the US options market, one of the most liquid derivatives markets in the world, processes roughly $4 trillion in notional volume per day. Prediction markets are not at that scale. They are at the stage the options market was at before institutional adoption normalised it as a tool for hedging real exposure.

The institutions are starting to notice. Forty percent of trading volume on Kalshi, Polymarket’s US-regulated competitor, now comes from institutional participants.

The question worth sitting with

For decades, information about what might happen next was locked inside models built by economists, strategists, and analysts at major institutions. Access to those models was expensive. The outputs were delayed. The track record was mixed.

A 29-year-old in Manila with $35 and an opinion about oil prices can now put that opinion into a market that aggregates it with a million other opinions, prices them in real time, and produces a number that competing institutions are starting to treat as a signal.

The question is not whether prediction markets are legitimate. The volume and the accuracy record have already answered that.

The question is what happens to the traditional forecasting and analysis industry when the crowd, priced by real stakes, keeps beating the professionals.

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