The B2B prediction markets landscape (August 2026).

The map in one screen

Prediction markets stopped being a curiosity in 2025 and became a supply chain in 2026. That supply chain now has four distinct layers, and confusing them is the most common analytical mistake in the category:

Layer	Who plays here	What they sell
1 · Venues & exchanges	Kalshi, Polymarket US (QCX), CME event contracts, ForecastEx, Rothera, Versus (UK), ADI Predictstreet (Gibraltar)	Regulated contract markets: listing, matching, clearing, settlement
2 · Distribution	Robinhood, DraftKings, FanDuel, Interactive Brokers, Moomoo — plus licensed iGaming operators	Access to an existing audience; order flow routed to a venue
3 · B2B platforms & infrastructure	Turbo Stars, Matchbook B2B, SOFTSWISS, Shift Markets, Azuro, Mrkts.com, Vinfotech, Match-Trader, custom shops	Technology for operators to offer the vertical under their own licence
4 · Market plumbing	Oracles, resolution sources, liquidity providers, clearing entities	Pricing, event resolution, risk and settlement services

The headline war between Kalshi and Polymarket happens on layer 1. The actual volume increasingly arrives through layer 2. The decision an iGaming operator has to make lives on layer 3. This report walks through all of them, then through the regulation that decides which combinations are even allowed.

Method: facts below were verified on August 17, 2026 against the linked primary or professional sources. Vendor statements are labelled vendor-reported. Figures from different datasets are kept separate and are not combined into a single market-size estimate.

The market in numbers — with denominators attached

• KPMG estimates combined 2025 trading volume across Kalshi and Polymarket exceeded $40 billion, up from roughly $9 billion in 2024.
• Kalshi generated $263.5 million in fee revenue on $22.9 billion of 2025 volume, per the same KPMG market-entry analysis — and KPMG reports that sports generated 89% of Kalshi's 2025 fee revenue. That is a Kalshi-specific revenue mix, not a market-wide share of bets, users or volume.
• TRM Labs measured more than $20 billion in monthly on-chain prediction-market volume in January 2026 across multiple venues, under a methodology that counts maker and taker sides separately.
• Robinhood reported $156 million of event-contracts revenue in Q2 2026 on 13.6 billion contracts traded — more than its equities or crypto transaction lines that quarter, and up more than tenfold year over year.
• DraftKings' CEO Jason Robins said annualized predictions volume grew from $2.3 billion to $11 billion between April and July 2026, as reported by Legal Sports Report.
• Capital has repriced the category: Kalshi raised $1 billion at a reported $22 billion valuation in May 2026, per Forbes; Polymarket has been reported to be raising $1 billion at a $20 billion valuation.
• Bernstein projects the category could reach $1 trillion in annual trading volume by 2030 — a named forecast, not a measurement, and it should be quoted as such.

Keep the denominators straight: annual venue volume, monthly on-chain volume, quarterly distributor revenue and annualized run rates come from different datasets with different counting rules. Any chart that stacks them is wrong by construction.

Layer 1 — venues: the licence holders

Kalshi remains the reference CFTC-designated contract market, and 2026 has been the year of its stress test. New York's Attorney General sued the company on July 31, 2026, seeking more than $36 billion and alleging unlicensed gambling; the CFTC responded by invoking emergency authority under Section 8a(9) of the Commodity Exchange Act on August 11, 2026, directing KalshiEX to continue operating, as reported by crypto.news. The federal-state fight is covered in the regulation section below.

Polymarket completed its structural re-entry into the US. It acquired the CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse QCEX for $112 million in July 2025; the resulting entity, QCX LLC, operates as a designated contract market doing business as Polymarket US, with an amended order of designation permitting an intermediated model. In April 2026 the company filed with the CFTC to let US users trade on its main global exchange. The original on-chain venue continues to drive the crypto-native side of the volume statistics.

The incumbents of finance arrived. CME Group lists event contracts and powers both DraftKings' and (at launch) FanDuel's products. ForecastEx serves Interactive Brokers. Rothera — a CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse launched in June 2026 as a joint venture between Robinhood and Susquehanna International Group — cleared over 3.5 billion contracts in its first weeks, per Robinhood's Q2 disclosure. The exchange layer is no longer a two-company story.

Licensed venues outside the US appeared for the first time in 2026. Versus launched in June 2026 as the first prediction-market platform operating under a UK Gambling Commission licence, and Gibraltar licensed ADI Predictstreet in April 2026 under its existing gambling regime — the first formal European prediction-market licence, as covered by iGaming Business.

Layer 2 — distribution: where the volume actually comes from

The most important structural shift of 2026 is that prediction markets became a distributed product. Standalone venue apps still matter, but the growth increasingly arrives through platforms that already own an audience:

• Robinhood turned event contracts into its second-largest transaction-revenue line ($156 million in Q2 2026, ahead of equities and crypto), routing through Kalshi, ForecastEx and now its own Rothera venue.
• DraftKings Predictions runs in all 50 states through CME's exchange — a sportsbook operator using federal derivatives rails to reach states where its sportsbook cannot go.
• FanDuel Predicts launched with CME in December 2025; in August 2026 Flutter announced it would move sports and novelty contracts to Crypto.com's exchange ahead of the NFL season, keeping CME for financial contracts.
• Interactive Brokers unified access to Kalshi, CME and ForecastEx in one interface in May 2026; Moomoo received NFA approval and is preparing its own entry, per DeFi Rate. BetMGM and Caesars have been reported to be evaluating entries.

The strategic read: scale in this category comes from distribution, not from venue brands. A venue with exclusive access to a large embedded audience beats a better-known venue without one. That is precisely the thesis under which licensed iGaming operators — who already own deposits, KYC and a betting audience — are evaluating the vertical. The B2B question is not “which venue wins” but “how does an operator plug its audience into this supply chain on its own licence.”

Layer 3 — the B2B vendor map for operators

The supplier side responded to 2026's demand with a wave of launches. Every descriptor below is vendor-reported from official product pages and announcements; none of it substitutes for buyer diligence on architecture, venue rights, retained risk and target-market permission.

Two observations about this map. First, the architectures are not interchangeable: a fixed-odds engine, a managed exchange, an aggregation layer and an on-chain protocol distribute risk, margin and regulatory burden completely differently — the model comparison below makes that concrete. Second, the August 2026 launch cluster (Mrkts.com, Vinfotech) signals that suppliers now treat the category as permanent infrastructure rather than an experiment, a read SCCG and other industry analysts share. For a ranked shortlist by operator type, see the buyer's guide to B2B prediction-markets platforms; for field-by-field vendor diligence, the evidence-dated side-by-side comparison.

Business models: who earns what

Model	Revenue source	Who holds the risk	Denominator caveat
Exchange / venue	Trading fees on matched volume	Traders (peer-to-peer); venue holds operational risk	Fee revenue vs notional volume differ by orders of magnitude
Fixed-odds product	Margin priced into the odds	Operator or vendor B-book retains market exposure	Quoted margins depend on settlement rules and mix
Liquidity aggregation	Platform/service economics on operator relationship; flow routed to external venues	Venue-side settlement; operator holds player relationship	Venue rights and per-venue terms are contract-specific
Distribution / rev-share	Commission or revenue share on routed order flow	Venue holds market risk	Run-rate figures are annualized snapshots, not audited revenue

Kalshi's 2025 economics illustrate the venue math: $263.5 million of fee revenue against $22.9 billion of volume is a take rate near one percent of notional — which is why distribution partners negotiating revenue share, and operators considering fixed-odds margin, are working with fundamentally different unit economics than the volume headlines suggest.

The regulatory map, August 2026

Region	Route	State of play
United States	CFTC designated contract markets; intermediaries via FCMs	Federal rulemaking in progress; active federal-state conflict
United Kingdom	Gambling Commission licence — most likely betting intermediary	First licensed platform live (Versus, June 2026)
Europe	No common framework; national regimes	One licence issued (Gibraltar); coordinated enforcement elsewhere
Brazil	None for event contracts	Banned effective May 4, 2026; active site blocking
Curaçao	CGA licensing under the LOK (in force since December 24, 2024)	Product-level assessment; an existing licence is not automatic coverage

United States: rulemaking plus a turf war

On June 10, 2026 the CFTC published a 267-page proposed rule for event contracts, as reported by ESPN: contracts on game outcomes and team performance would be permitted, while contracts on player injuries, officiating decisions, in-game discrete actions, youth sports, and on war, assassination and terrorism would be banned. Chairman Michael Selig framed it as “a durable, transparent framework… while letting legitimate markets move forward.”

Meanwhile the preemption fight sharpened into a genuine circuit-level split. The Third Circuit held in April 2026 that sports event contracts on a CFTC-designated market are likely shielded from New Jersey enforcement, per Holland & Knight's analysis; a Manhattan federal judge reached the opposite conclusion for New York in July; Massachusetts and Maryland courts also ruled against preemption. New York's July 31 lawsuit seeking more than $36 billion from Kalshi, the CFTC's August 11 emergency order in response, the CFTC's own suits against nine states, criminal charges in Arizona and tribal-sovereignty claims complete the picture. The realistic planning assumption for any US-facing strategy is that the boundary will ultimately be set by appellate courts, Congress or both — not by any single ruling this year.

United Kingdom: channelled into the existing regime

The Gambling Commission stated in February 2026 that prediction products offered in Great Britain which meet the legal definition of gambling must be licensed — most likely as betting intermediaries, given the mechanical similarity to betting exchanges, per the UKGC's guidance. The FCA's March 2026 perimeter report separates contracts referencing financial matters (financial regulation) from non-financial events (gambling regulation). Versus' June 2026 launch under a UKGC licence demonstrates the route is usable in practice.

Europe: one licence, nine enforcers

There is no EU-level framework. Gibraltar issued Europe's first prediction-market licence in April 2026. In June 2026 — timed to the World Cup — nine national regulators (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland) announced coordinated action against unlicensed prediction platforms, per iGaming Business. On the financial side, ESMA has warned that some event contracts may function as financial instruments for retail clients, and the European Commission's targeted MiCA consultation — including whether DLT-based prediction markets belong in scope — runs to September 30, 2026. For operators, Europe is a market-by-market legal question with an enforcement-first default.

Brazil: the hard stop

Brazil banned event contracts tied to sports, politics and entertainment effective May 4, 2026 (CMN Resolution 5,298), with Anatel blocking access to non-compliant platforms, per Lefosse's legal alert. A separate, financial-markets route via the B3 exchange is developing for financial event contracts. Serving Brazil requires authorization under the Brazilian framework; an offshore licence is not a substitute.

What the landscape means for an operator

1. Distribution is the moat — and operators already have it. The 2026 winners on the demand side (Robinhood, DraftKings) won by attaching event contracts to an existing audience. A licensed operator's deposits, KYC and betting audience are the same asset; the vertical is a product-line decision, not a new-company decision.
2. Sports concentration is a venue-specific fact, not a law of nature. Sports generated 89% of Kalshi's 2025 fee revenue per KPMG, but TRM Labs found geopolitics, US politics and macro dominating its on-chain cohort. Model your own audience mix as a testable hypothesis, by venue and category.
3. Pick the architecture before the vendor. Fixed-odds (you or the vendor hold risk), managed exchange (venue holds risk, you hold the brand), aggregation (venue-side settlement, native wallet integration) and on-chain (protocol rails) are different businesses. The vendor shortlist follows from that choice — not the other way around.
4. Regulation decides sequencing, not feasibility. The same product may be a derivatives instrument in the US, betting intermediation in the UK, unlicensed gambling in nine European markets and banned in Brazil. Launch order should follow the licence map, and platform delivery must never be presented as legal authorization.
5. The window for differentiation is now. With B2B launches clustering in mid-2026, the category is standardising fast. Cross-sell into casino and sportsbook on one wallet — measured as a first-party cohort result, not assumed — is where an iGaming operator has an edge that broker-distributed venues cannot copy.

Three ways in

• Route your audience to a venue (distribution/rev-share): fastest, least control, venue-dependent economics — the broker model applied to betting audiences.
• License a B2B platform: fixed-odds, managed exchange or aggregation inside your own stack; the operator diligence checklist lives in our prediction-markets launch guide and the white-label buyer's guide.
• Build: full control, longest path, and you inherit every market-plumbing problem (pricing, resolution, liquidity, clearing) the vendors above exist to solve.

For how the vertical compares with a classic sportsbook P&L, see prediction markets vs sportsbook; for why a famous venue is not a B2B platform, see Polymarket for operators; for the June 2026 data-literacy snapshot this report extends, see prediction markets in iGaming: 2026 market overview.