World Cup Final Drives Billions in Bets on Kalshi and Polymarket

When Argentina and Spain take the field on Sunday for the World Cup final, more than $5.69 billion will be riding on the winner on the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi.People are also betting millions on who wins third place and the Golden Boot award for top scorer.Others are wagering on what the announcers might say or whether it will be the final tournament for the Argentina team captain, Lionel Messi.The event has helped drive new users to the prediction markets, which have grown rapidly and transformed into a cultural phenomenon in recent months.

The sites allow users to wager on the outcome of just about anything, from elections to details about Taylor Swift’s wedding to the winner of the reality-TV show “Survivor.”Prediction market users are poised to make the World Cup the largest gambling event in history, analysts said.In June, total wagers on the platforms topped $50 billion for the first time, much of it driven by the soccer tournament, according to data from Dune Analytics, a crypto data tracker.

That was up from about $2 billion the same month a year ago.The performance of prediction markets during the World Cup has “surpassed every estimate that any of us have projected,” said Chad Beynon, a gaming and lodging analyst at the financial services firm Macquarie Group.He estimated that the World Cup had helped quadruple monthly trading volumes across both platforms.Nearly 270,000 people downloaded the Kalshi app the week the tournament began, according to data shared by the company from Apptopia.

Two weeks earlier, it had about 60,000 downloads.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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