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Kalshi now moves $40B+ in monthly volume while handling roughly 80% of U.S. prediction market volume. The figures lie in stark contrast to recent developments, the most pertinent being the Senate’s decision to quash the highly awaited crypto market structure bill, à la CLARITY.
Key Takeaways
- Kalshi’s 30-day volume hit $14.1 billion on Sept. 4 against Polymarket’s $3.1 billion, an 82% share.
- The Senate blocked the CLARITY Act 49-50 on Sept. 15, ending market structure legislation for 2026.
- Polymarket now prices just a 7% chance the CLARITY Act becomes law before the end of the year.
A Regulated Winner on a Losing Night
Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo highlighted the striking metric hours after the vote, noting:
$40 billion regulated prediction market Kalshi is now 80% of all US volume. Global crypto demand is returning to American markets. We dont need CLARITY.”
The wording seemed quite deliberate given Kalshi is the venue that never needed a new law, primarily because it already had one. To elaborate, the prediction giant received the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) approval as a Designated Contract Market in 2021, making it the first federally regulated prediction exchange in U.S. history.
Everything it lists trades inside an existing framework, which is precisely what the CLARITY Act was meant to build for the rest of the industry.
That bill failed on a 49-50 cloture vote on Sept. 15, 11 short of the 60 needed to open debate, effectively ending market structure legislation for 2026.
The Volume Gap, in Numbers
The 80% figure presented by Rizzo holds up against the overarching data available, as Kalshi’s 30-day rolling volume reached $14.1 billion (as of Sept. 4), against $3.1 billion for Polymarket, which works out to roughly an 82% share between the two dominant venues.
The gap, however, is recent, given that Bitcoin.com News reported that Kalshi overtook Polymarket for the first time in April, posting $5.42 billion in taker volume against Polymarket’s $1.99 billion, in a month when the whole sector cleared $8.6 billion.
Combined monthly volume across the two has climbed from under $5 billion in September 2025 to roughly $24 billion by April 2026. The valuation has followed; i.e. Kalshi is raising at least $750 million at $40 billion, double its $22 billion mark from six months earlier.
Sports carries most of that flow, accounting for over 80% of Kalshi’s own trading. But the regulatory posture is the asset, not the sports book.
The Argument Rizzo Is Making
Strip out the overly exaggerated language used by Rizzo, and one can see that the claim he is making is a legitimate one. If the largest regulated venue in a crypto-adjacent market can scale to a multi-billion figure per month (under rules written in 2021), the industry’s dependence on new legislation may be overstated.
The counterargument seems to be just as clean since Kalshi’s contracts are event futures with an obvious regulator, while spot tokens, exchanges and custodians sit in the jurisdictional gap the CLARITY Act was drafted to close. A designated contract market license does nothing for a token issuer.
What is not in dispute is where the volumes have gone. On the night Congress declined to write crypto’s rules, the fastest-growing regulated market in American finance was busy setting records without them. The next real test is the midterms, where Kalshi and Polymarket have already opened markets.
English (US) ·