Kalshi reports over US$1 billion Super Bowl trading volume

Abi Bray

11 February 2026 at 5:12am UTC-5

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Prediction market Kalshi recorded more than US$1 billion in trading volume during the Super Bowl on Sunday, marking a daily high for the platform.

Chief Executive Tarek Mansour told CNBC the total rose 2,700% year-over-year as users traded contracts tied to game outcomes and entertainment segments.

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Speaking on CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’, Mansour said, “It was an incredible weekend. Kalshi was the biggest brand of the Super Bowl this year, without running a Super Bowl ad, and the way we achieved that is the product.”

Contracts linked to halftime performer Bad Bunny’s opening song generated more than US$100 million in volume. The markets in which artists would appear alongside him surpassed US$45 million.

Co-Founder Luana Lopes Lara wrote on social media platform X that some user deposits were delayed because of traffic during the game. “Your money is safe and on the way, it will just take longer to land,” she said.

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The company has faced scrutiny in recent months over potential insider trading on event-based contracts.

Concerns were raised after the prediction market platform began offering markets on the ads shown during the game, given the high number of employees from companies who would already know the outcomes.

However, ahead of the game, Kalshi announced it had expanded its surveillance and enforcement processes, with Mansour stating that Kalshi was applying the same rules as major US exchanges over its markets and had conducted over 200 investigations in the past year.

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The Backstory

Why the Super Bowl became a stress test

Kalshi’s billion-dollar trading day did not happen in a vacuum. The Super Bowl concentrated months of user growth, product expansion and regulatory friction into a single, high-stakes stress test for the event-contract model. The platform leaned into the moment with markets that stretched beyond the score and player props to entertainment and brand cameos, inviting retail traders and market makers to price everything from halftime set lists to celebrity pairings. Traffic surged so sharply that some deposits lagged, underscoring both the scale of new demand and the strain of onboarding it all at once. The weekend crystallized a core thesis of prediction markets: if you can turn culture into tradable risk, liquidity will find it.

The rub is that not all tradable risk is created equal. Markets tied to ad content and show elements sit closer to information asymmetry than a final score. That line — between what the crowd can discover and what insiders already know — has defined Kalshi’s recent run-up as much as its product innovation. Sunday’s volumes were a headline moment, but the backstory is a year of rising usage, rising scrutiny and a push to convince regulators and partners that enforcement tools can keep pace with growth.

A breakout year for prediction markets

Momentum built through late 2025 as retail participation and headline events lifted turnover. In November, Kalshi and rival Polymarket set a combined record of about $10 billion in monthly trading, with Kalshi breaking its own high as spot volume climbed to $5.8 billion from $4.4 billion in October and Polymarket up to more than $3.7 billion. The Block’s data, cited in reporting on the November surge, showed the two platforms consolidating market share into what analysts called an emerging duopoly. Product hooks multiplied — tying contracts to elections, macro prints and cultural moments — while deeper integrations made it easier for retail to see and trade odds in real time.

Capital followed. Kalshi doubled its valuation to $11 billion on a $1 billion raise, while Polymarket inked distribution deals with Yahoo and Google Finance and moved toward a regulated U.S. footprint. Those moves signaled that prediction markets were no longer a niche oddsmaker’s playground but an investable, software-driven venue for pricing event risk. Sunday’s Super Bowl dollar volumes were a logical extension of that trajectory, not an outlier — the kind of liquidity spike that occurs when an audience of more than 100 million turns a national tentpole into a single order book.

Growth built on downloads and legal gray zones

User acquisition accelerated into the game. Kalshi’s app downloads in January surpassed three million, topping DraftKings and FanDuel, according to Apptopia estimates cited by Bloomberg. The advantage was structural: Kalshi operates as a federally regulated venue under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not as a state-by-state sportsbook. That status let Kalshi scale distribution nationally while incumbent sportsbooks navigated licensing gates. The download gap — unprecedented in U.S. real-money gaming apps, per Apptopia — foreshadowed a Super Bowl crowd ready to trade beyond the point spread.

But the same federal classification that speeds growth also invites conflict with state regulators and gaming stakeholders who view sports event contracts as wagers without the consumer protections and tax regime that govern sportsbooks. Analysts at Eilers & Krejcik have mapped a bifurcated path from here: the category could grow to about $1 trillion in annual volume by decade’s end, led by sports, yet legal risks could delay or derail that upside. Their outlook, detailed in a recent report on prediction markets’ runway and roadblocks, tracked a series of state-level flashpoints. Pennsylvania’s regulator warned casinos and sportsbooks to avoid prediction markets, while other states, including Connecticut, Nevada and New York, have tangled with platforms over whether sports event contracts fall under gambling laws rather than CFTC rules. Kalshi itself has faced stop-and-start enforcement, including a cease-and-desist in Tennessee before a federal injunction let it keep operating.

Insider knowledge and ad markets light a fuse

Sunday’s entertainment contracts magnified the sector’s thorniest compliance issue: insider trading. The risk is straightforward. Sports outcomes are uncertain, but ad lineups and celebrity cameos are known to hundreds of agency, brand and talent staffers weeks in advance. When platforms list markets on those elements, they introduce asymmetric information that looks less like prediction and more like selective disclosure.

Those concerns flared ahead of the game as Kalshi and Polymarket rolled out ad-related contracts. Our coverage of that push, detailing how ad markets stoked insider-trading alarms, noted that industry groups urged tighter federal rules and questioned the CFTC’s bandwidth to police behavior at social-media speed. Kalshi responded by expanding surveillance and enforcement, emphasizing it was applying exchange-grade standards and had opened more than 200 investigations in the past year. The policy posture is clear: broaden market menus to capture cultural alpha, then harden market integrity to keep institutional partners and regulators onside. The Super Bowl’s billion-dollar spike will test whether that balance holds as new users pile in.

Wall Street edges in, capital piles up

Liquidity does not materialize without professional counterparties. In the past year, traditional market makers and quant shops began treating event contracts like another frontier in exchange-traded risk. Chicago-based Jump Trading started creating markets in Kalshi’s sports event contracts, an expansion of its long-running sports betting and exchange-trading experiments. As we reported in coverage of Jump’s push into event markets, the firm framed U.S. sports trading as ripe for a new market structure. Other Wall Street voices have weighed similar moves, betting that exchange-style liquidity and tighter spreads can draw retail volume from parlay-heavy sportsbooks.

Institutional participation changes the texture and the stakes. It deepens books and smooths price discovery around news, but it also tightens the arms race on data and compliance. The funding wave — Kalshi’s $1 billion raise, Polymarket’s strategic investment from a major exchange operator — gives platforms the capital to court market makers, scale tech and invest in surveillance. It also raises expectations for discipline. As liquidity crowds into election cycles, economic prints and pop culture, platforms will be judged by how well they prevent informational edge from turning into unfair markets.

The stakes after a record day

Kalshi’s Super Bowl haul validated a product strategy that turns cultural spectacle into tradable risk and a distribution strategy that reaches users beyond the sportsbook map. It also sharpened the policy and operational questions that will define the next phase: where to draw lines on listable events, how to deter insider trading that looks more like ad-industry leakage than classic securities fraud, and whether federal and state rules can coexist without fracturing the market.

If November’s record month and Sunday’s record day are any guide, the ceiling for demand sits well above the old sportsbook playbook. The floor, however, will be set by credibility. With regulators watching, Wall Street stepping in and retail already onboard, the platform that pairs growth with guardrails will write the rules for everyone else.