Kalshi Says World Cup Surge Brought 3 Million New Users as Prediction Markets Hit Record Trading Volumes

The FIFA World Cup has become a defining moment for prediction markets, driving unprecedented activity on Kalshi and helping the platform attract 3 million new users during the tournament.

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Trading tied to the tournament has reached a level the company says it has never seen before. More than $1.2 billion changed hands on Kalshi’s market asking users to predict the eventual World Cup champion, making it the largest single prediction market in the platform’s history. Trading on that contract concludes after last nights final between Spain and Argentina.

The scale of the event is hardly surprising to marketing specialists who point to soccer’s unmatched global reach. With the sport commanding audiences across nearly every region of the world, the World Cup offers a larger potential customer base than almost any other sporting event, creating an unusually fertile environment for companies trying to introduce new products to mass audiences.

Marketing campaign built around football’s biggest stage

Kalshi spent the tournament ensuring its brand appeared wherever those audiences were looking.

The company secured in-stadium exposure through a co-branding arrangement with ADI Predictstreet, the World Cup’s official prediction market sponsor. It also expanded its digital reach through a partnership with OpenAI, allowing ChatGPT users searching for World Cup matches to see odds from Kalshi’s prediction contracts alongside tournament information.

Away from the technology partnerships, the company assembled an aggressive celebrity campaign built around recognizable names from football. Croatian midfielder Luka Modric, longtime Real Madrid manager José Mourinho and Argentina’s national team all featured in promotional efforts. One agreement also placed the company in front of Lionel Messi’s massive Instagram audience through a social media post connected to the partnership.

Kalshi’s chief executive, Tarek Mansour, has made rapid-response marketing a central feature of the campaign. The company says one commercial featuring former professional footballers was conceived, produced and released within a single day, reflecting an effort to capitalize on conversations while they are still unfolding rather than relying on long production cycles.

The marketing push extended beyond soccer as well. Actor Timothée Chalamet appeared in a campaign released during the NBA Finals, when his appearances at New York Knicks games were attracting widespread attention. Colombian recording artist J Balvin later joined another advertisement released during the World Cup, broadening the campaign beyond sports fans.

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Marketing researchers see that approach as an attempt to position prediction markets as a product with appeal well beyond major sporting events. By attaching the brand to entertainment figures and cultural moments outside football, Kalshi appears to be signaling that its platform is designed for a much broader range of events.

Regulatory fight continues in the background

The tournament’s commercial success arrives while prediction markets remain the subject of a broader regulatory dispute.

Several states contend that sports-related event contracts function much like sports betting, an area traditionally regulated at the state level. Kalshi, by contrast, maintains that oversight belongs exclusively to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission because prediction markets fall within federal derivatives regulation.

Mansour has argued that resistance to the company’s sports contracts is driven largely by established gambling operators seeking to protect their market position rather than by regulatory concerns alone.

Legal observers suggest the advertising campaign itself is unlikely to influence how courts ultimately resolve those jurisdictional questions. Even so, they note that emphasizing sports so heavily could reinforce the public perception that prediction markets are closely aligned with gambling, despite the industry’s efforts to present itself as serving a much wider range of forecasting uses.

Turning World Cup traders into long-term users

The next challenge may prove less about attracting attention than keeping it.

Trading activity has noticeably cooled on days without World Cup matches, underscoring how dependent volumes remain on marquee events. Converting millions of first-time users into regular participants will test whether the tournament created lasting engagement or simply delivered a temporary spike tied to one of the world’s biggest sporting spectacles.

Kalshi argues that this pattern has repeated itself before. Major news events generate bursts of activity, followed by quieter periods, before fresh developments create the next wave of trading. From the company’s perspective, the end of the World Cup is simply the conclusion of one news cycle rather than the end of the opportunity.

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