Saturday was a record sports day for Kalshi, as the first full week of the college football season helped the prediction market record its highest volume outside of U.S. election day in 2024 with $84.9 million worth of trades.
In terms of Kalshi’s revenue from fees, it was almost the first million-dollar day for the prediction market, as no fees were charged on trades related to the 2024 election. Fees from Saturday’s action came to $914,000, InGame analysis of Kalshi’s trade data shows.
College football was clearly the driver of that growth. In total, $59.8 million was traded on college football markets, handing Kalshi around $649,000 in fees.
Those numbers are likely to be comfortably exceeded when the NFL season begins this week. The opening game on Thursday between the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles will be big, but it’s the first Sunday – with 13 games kicking off – that looks sure to smash volume records.
Looking at early trades
One early measure is Kalshi trades on the days leading up to NFL Week 1, compared to the days leading up to college football’s Week 1.
Between Aug. 20 and Aug. 26, around $837,000 of Kalshi contracts were traded on college football games taking place on Aug. 30 – the first full Saturday of the season.
Meanwhile, in a comparable one-week period between Aug. 27 and Sept. 2, almost $1.6 million of contracts were traded on Sunday’s NFL games. That is 88% higher than the college amount.
If NFL trading on Kalshi for Sunday’s games ultimately proves to be 88% higher than college football trading, the prediction market may see around $113 million traded on NFL contracts alone, easily eclipsing the total amount traded on all categories last Saturday.
Add in contracts from other sports and non-sporting events — as well as Week 2 college football games — and trading volume could approach $150 million. On Aug. 31, a Sunday, there were $59.8 million of contracts traded, of which $28.0 million were on two college football games that took place that day, meaning $31.8 million was traded on events other than the day’s college football games.
If there’s a similar level of non-football activity on Sunday, that could bring total trading to $145 million.
The men’s U.S. Open tennis final will also take place Sunday, as will soccer’s Manchester Derby. (Aug. 31 also had a major English soccer matchup, between Liverpool and Arsenal.) With the U.S. Open at the fourth-round stage last Sunday, there were more matches but none of equivalent magnitude to a Grand Slam final.
If the tennis final goes to five sets, that may also have a significant impact on trading revenue, with $31.8M traded on the five-set French Open final this year.
NFL bigger than college at sportsbooks
There also could be reason to think the day becomes significantly larger if sportsbooks offer a useful comparison.
Data show that regulated sportsbooks in the states that break betting football data down into college and pros — Colorado and Maryland — saw between three and four times as much handle on the NFL than on the NCAA during September, October, and November last year.
Figures for Colorado and Maryland may not be representative of U.S. sportsbooks as a whole, and Kalshi traders may have different betting patterns than sportsbook bettors.
But if the NFL was similarly three to four times as popular than college on Kalshi, that would mean the exchange might record volume of close to $200 million on Sunday on pro football. Throw in other markets, and total trading volume could get closer to $250 million.
These numbers still aren’t close to the figures from the 2024 elections, primarily for president. Though Kalshi’s daily trade data doesn’t go that far back, the exchange says it recorded more than $1 billion of trading volume on Nov. 5.
Trading volume is the closest equivalent to handle in an exchange-betting format. However, the two should not be seen as a like-for–like comparison.
For example, on Kalshi, if a trader makes a bet before a game and then cashes out at halftime, this is counted twice in volume totals, compared to only once when sportsbooks report handle on wagers. Because Kalshi data are anonymized, there is no way to determine which trades represent a user “cashing out.”
How much money will Kalshi make?
Kalshi typically makes about one cent in fees for every dollar traded on the exchange.
However, the fee it charges for each individual trade varies depending on the odds.
Trades at close to 50/50 odds mean higher fees per dollar of volume, and bets on particularly long or short odds have lower fees. This is because a flat fee would represent an extremely large share of the stake in a longshot bet or an extremely large share of the potential winnings in the case of a bet on a near-certainty.
For example, if Kalshi instead imposed a flat one-cent fee and a bet was placed on an event with a 99% implied probability, the trader’s entire winnings would be eaten up by the fee.
This rule means that Kalshi’s fee revenue Sunday may be more than 1% of its trading volume because the NFL schedule has fewer projected mismatches or large blowouts than college football. Fees on Saturday’s college football games were 1.1% of trading volume.
If the trading volume Sunday is somewhere between $150 and $200 million, then fees might be a little above the $1.5 million to $2 million range.
Will new markets or rivals change projections?
Other factors could affect how much money is traded Sunday on Kalshi. Last month, the exchange launched markets for point spreads and game totals. While these are available on Kalshi’s site, they are not yet available on Robinhood, which provides the majority of Kalshi’s trading volume.
Without activity from Robinhood, trading on college football spreads and totals at Kalshi over the weekend were low, with less than $400,000 traded on Saturday. Robinhood has not given any indication that it will start offering the markets this weekend. If it does, the impact on volume could be significant.
If point spreads and totals gain more popularity, that could push fees consistently above the 1% of volume benchmark, as those bets are designed to have something close to a 50% probability on each side.
Kalshi could also launch two new types of market before the weekend. It self-certified to offer its first player props — specifically, bets on touchdown scorers — alongside the spreads and totals markets, but has not yet listed them. A spokesperson told InGame that the plan is for these contracts to be live for Week 1, though they could be delayed.
Tuesday, Kalshi self-certified a contract type that appears to refer to parlays, as it references bets with multiple components and payout odds that are the product of each component part. If these are offered, they could again be a significant boost to volume. Kalshi said in the filing that it planned to list these contracts by Wednesday, but there is no guarantee that it will do so. The date listed on the self-certification documents for player props passed without these contracts going up.
On the other hand, Kalshi could face greater competition. Tuesday, fantasy and sports betting operator Underdog said that its users in 16 states would be able to access sports event contracts from Crypto.com through a deal in which Underdog is technically a “tech provider.”
Meanwhile, Polymarket, which exceeds Kalshi in global volume, may return to the U.S. market just before the weekend. The exchange, which currently does not allow U.S. customers, in July bought a little-known exchange named QCEX that is already registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Polymarket is awaiting final checks from the commission on some of its rulebook documents. The review period for these checks would end Friday.
If Polymarket returns to the U.S. for the NFL’s Week 1, it could take customers from Kalshi, though the impact would be hard to determine.
