DraftKings told investors on June 9 that its prediction markets business is growing rapidly, and that the market liked what it saw. The company Form 8-K reported that year-over-year consumer volume in its Predictions offering rose 24% month-over-month to $1.3 billion in May 2026, while total traded volume rose 34% year-over-year to $3.1 billion. DraftKings shares rose roughly 10% in early trading on the news.
These numbers are huge for a product line that is barely six months old, considering DraftKings only launched Predictions in December 2025. Seen in the broader category, however, they show that a late-to-market company has already built prediction-native platforms into something much bigger.
That $3.1 billion is an annual run rate, which translates to about $258 million in actual volume in May. Kalshi, on the other hand, processed $17.9 billion in May alone.
The gap between DraftKings’ $258 million and the prediction markets’ $24 billion
Prediction markets allow people to trade contracts tied to the outcome of future events, from elections and inflation data to sports results and crypto prices. Each contract pays out $1 if the event happens and $0 if it doesn’t, and the price in between acts like a live probability meter: a contract trading at 65 cents means traders collectively give the outcome a 65% probability.
You can hold until the event is resolved or sell early at the going price, just as you would with a stock. That structure essentially makes these platforms behave like financial exchanges, with order books and constantly changing prices, which is a big part of why so many companies are rushing.
It also helps to decode one piece of accounting in the DraftKings announcement. “Annualized” means the company took one month of activity and multiplied it by twelve. This is a standard way to show momentum, but makes the main figure twelve times greater than what actually happened.
Take that out and DraftKings handled about $258 million in trades in May. The established platforms operate on a completely different scale. Combined monthly trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket, the two biggest names, rose from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to around $24 billion in April 2026, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
May data released after the Pew survey showed the two platforms moving in opposite directions: Kalshi made a notch ninth monthly record in a row at $17.91 billion, while Polymarket fell to $7.08 billionthe second consecutive monthly decline.
For perspective, all legal U.S. sportsbooks combined will take in approximately $14 billion in wagers per month by 2025. The prediction market category that DraftKings has just entered is already making more money than the sector that DraftKings came from.
However, it is important to note that each platform measures volume differently. Robinhood skips dollars altogether and reports the number of contracts traded, a figure that sounds astronomical because contracts almost always cost less than a dollar each.
Its CEO, Vlad Tenev, said more than 12 billion contracts would be traded on the platform by 2025 and predicted the company could eventually drive market growth. “trillions” in annual volume, while Deutsche Bank counted more than 16 billion contracts until now in 2026. The measurements vary, but every version of the math leads to the same place: DraftKings’ May volume is about what Kalshi moves in a week.
Sports is the engine that drives all of this, which explains why a sportsbook felt compelled to show up. Sports alone accounts for roughly 80% of Kalshi’s volume, and together with politics and crypto, it has driven about 91% of Kalshi’s activity and 90% of Polymarket since July 2024, as CryptoSlate has reported.
DraftKings has timed the reveal well, with landing days at the 2026 World Cup and just after the NBA Finals, and one estimation puts the potential market activity for predicting the World Cup at a level of $2.5 billion.
What the sportsbooks are really aiming for
Each side of this fight has weapons that the other side does not have. Sportsbooks bring millions of existing customers, well-known brands, payment infrastructure, huge marketing budgets and years of experience in live odds pricing.
The prediction-based platforms offer large pools of traders willing to take the other side of any contract, a much broader menu of events and, crucially, a legal structure that allows them to operate where sportsbooks cannot.
DraftKings CEO Jason Robins told investors that’s what the company plans to do to acquire a leading position in sports forecasts before the end of the year, and the company has increased its estimate of the total market it can address to between $55 billion and $80 billion.
That legal structure is the entire reason this category exists. Sports betting in America is regulated on a state-by-state basis, and every sportsbook needs to be licensed in every state in which it operates. Event contracts take a different legal route: They are classified as derivatives, financial instruments that are supervised only by the CFTC, the same regulator that watches over oil and corn futures. A federal license means one approval covers the entire country. For example, DraftKings launched Predictions in 38 states, including some where online sports betting remains illegal.
Whether that route survives is now the central legal battle in American gambling. A federal appeals court ruled on April 6 that Kalshi’s sports contracts likely fall under exclusive federal jurisdiction. shield them of New Jersey Gambling Enforcement.
Ten days later, another appeals court hearing Nevada’s case seemed inclined to rule the opposite. If the courts part ways, the Supreme Court usually has to decide the case, predicting that market traders will set a price themselves 64% chance the Supreme Court will hear a case by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, enforcement continues to escalate in both directions: The CFTC sued Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois in April to stop them from going after Kalshi and Polymarket, courts in Maryland and Massachusetts have sided with state regulators, Kalshi is being confronted more than a dozen federal lawsuits, and CryptoSlate’s reporting shows the same tension spreading abroad, from user surveys in South Korea to platform blockages in Brazil.
The next ruling to watch comes from the Sixth Circuit, where Kalshi is appealing an Ohio decision that went against it, and the coalition against the company there has only grown larger.
Former CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler, who headed the agency when Dodd-Frank was implemented in 2010, filed amicus brief on June 11, arguing that Congress never intended his office to become a national regulator of sports betting, and that sports betting is not an exchange under the law he helped write.
He filed alongside the American Gaming Association, 30 Native American tribes, the Indian Gaming Association and Better Markets. In a parallel case in Massachusetts, 38 attorneys general have already lined up behind the state.
The split also runs through the sportsbook industry itself. DraftKings and FanDuel stop the AGA in November 2025, days before DraftKings launched Predictions, after the trading group moved to block members who operate prediction markets. The same association is now arguing in court that DraftKings’ newly built product is illegal gambling.
There’s one more thing worth understanding before you take these numbers at face value: volume is how much money changes hands, but gain is the small piece that keeps the platform. The portion comes from fees of a few cents per contract, so a billion dollars in trade might generate only a few million in actual revenue.
The industry as a whole generated about $31 million in fees in April, and Polymarket collected $29 million of that, despite lagging badly behind Kalshi in volume as its traders placed bigger bets. DraftKings hasn’t said how much the Predictions volume is making, so the $3.1 billion run rate only measures traction, and the earnings question remains open.
The growth of DraftKings’ prediction markets is tremendous, and the 34% monthly jump is the kind of number that moves a stock. But the more important point is that traditional sportsbooks are following a category they didn’t invent, a category where Kalshi, Polymarket and Robinhood have already shown that event contracts can generate billions in monthly volume and have spent years building both the trading depth and the legal arguments to defend them.
Whether DraftKings can turn its sports audience into exchange-style traders before these platforms become too liquid to capture is the open question, and the answer will say a lot about whether the sportsbook model absorbs or is absorbed by prediction markets.