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A basketball finds nothing but net during practice before a 2024 NCAA Tournament game at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh. Charles LeClaire | Reuters Prediction markets saw strong results from the Super Bowl, but it was just an appetizer for a banquet of sporting events in 2026 that are expected to drive surging volumes in event contracts. Kalshi saw record downloads during Super Bowl week, up 1,544% from the same time period last year, according to a report from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Daily active users jumped more than 1,100% to nearly 2 million on the day of the big game, the firm said. That was almost three times the daily active users on sportsbook BetMGM, co-owned by MGM and Entain, which had 81% growth to 680,000 daily active users. Polymarket reported 59,000 daily active users and 264% growth over the previous year. More than $1 billion was traded on Kalshi for the Super Bowl, up 2,700% according to the company. Founder and CEO Tarek Mansour told CNBC Tuesday that consumers are drawn by having lots of trading options for the game in one place. “Our culture markets were huge this weekend. You know, ‘What [Bad] Bunny was going to perform’ was over $100 million in trading,” he said. Though prediction markets enable users to buy event contracts for a wide swath of financial, weather, pop culture and other events, sports have been driving the action and the profits. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is pushing back against any investor concerns the Super Bowl was as good as it gets for trading on sports prediction markets. “What we’re actually seeing is surprising us,” Tenev said on his company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. “In January, for instance, NBA contracts surpassed NFL in trading activity on our platform.” Major sports events…

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Filed under: News - @ February 11, 2026 6:29 pm