Rolling weekly volume topped $2.3 billion across Kalshi and Polymarket over the past seven days.

Kalshi posted a little over $1.76 billion in rolling weekly volume, while Polymarket recorded $511 million. Kalshi’s share of the market stands at 78%.

Data from DeFi Rate tracker. Weekly figures reflect seven-day rolling volume as of December 8, 2025 at 12:31 AM PST

NFL continues the weekly volume cycle, followed by Fed decision

NFL games again led Kalshi’s weekly volume. Kansas City at Dallas was the top market at $47.1 million, followed by Cincinnati at Baltimore ($43.7 million) and Green Bay at Detroit ($33.0 million). Indiana at Ohio State ($32.4 million) rounded out the top four as the week’s largest college football market. All four contracts have settled—Dallas, Cincinnati, Green Bay, and Indiana won.

Polymarket’s top sports markets are futures. The 2026 NBA Champion contract has drawn $14.7 million in volume, with Oklahoma City leading at 42% odds. The UEFA Champions League Winner market sits at $12.1 million, with Arsenal (19%) ahead of Bayern Munich (18%).

The upcoming Fed decision closes Dec. 10. Traders have placed $111 million on the contract—$87.5 million on Polymarket, $23.4 million on Kalshi. Odds on a 25 basis point cut sitting at 91-93% across both markets.

Though Kalshi has a lead on Polymarket, Robinhood accounts for a significant share of Kalshi’s volume. In the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call, incoming CFO Shiv Verma said “a very large chunk of Kalshi’s volume is actually coming from Robinhood.” The brokerage traded 2.5 billion prediction market contracts in October.

Other partners offering Kalshi contracts include Webull (hourly crypto and Fed events), which launched in February, and PrizePicks (sports and culture picks in 38 states), which launched November 14.

Polymarket received CFTC approval for intermediated trading on November 25, allowing brokerages and FCMs to list its contracts. The platform partnered with PrizePicks the same week as Kalshi, but that integration awaits Polymarket’s full U.S. launch. MetaMask rolled out Polymarket predictions last week.

Kalshi has raised $1 billion in new funding at an $11 billion valuation, per TechCrunch. The round, led by returning investors Sequoia and CapitalG, comes less than two months after the prediction market operator closed a $300 million round at a $5 billion valuation.

The fundraise arrives alongside a notable data point: Kalshi now generates more weekly trading volume than Polymarket, despite having built its user base almost entirely with American traders.

Geographic context matters

Polymarket was barred from serving US residents from 2022 until September 2025. During that three-year period, the platform built its liquidity with traders from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.

Kalshi, by contrast, operated as a US-only exchange until October 10, when it announced expansion to 140 countries. That expansion is six weeks old, and per Sportico, international access remains inconsistent. Traders in India, Brazil, Nigeria, and Finland have posted on Discord and X that they cannot register accounts.

It’s fair to assume Kalshi’s current volume is based on US users.

This reframes the comparison in two ways. First, the US alone is generating more prediction market activity than the rest of the world combined—a testament to American appetite for event trading. Second, Kalshi captured that market while Polymarket was locked out of it.

Per-market liquidity still favors Polymarket

The aggregate numbers obscure a significant gap in individual market depth. Polymarket’s highest-volume contract—Super Bowl Champion 2026—has generated $160.7 million in trading volume over the past 30 days. Kalshi’s leading market, the Federal Reserve’s December 2025 interest rate decision, has produced $3.5 million.

Where identical events trade on both platforms, the spread is substantial. The December Fed decision shows $120.9 million in volume on Polymarket versus $3.5 million on Kalshi. The 2028 Democratic Presidential Nominee market shows $104.3 million on Polymarket versus $1 million on Kalshi.

This gap likely reflects Polymarket’s three-year head start building liquidity in high-profile markets. It may also reflect user composition: Polymarket’s crypto-native audience—users depositing USDC and connecting wallets—skews toward larger position sizes. Kalshi’s fiat on-ramps and Robinhood integration (25-35% of volume) attract a different profile.

Valuation context

Kalshi’s $11 billion valuation arrives as the company reports $50 billion in annualized trading volume, per the New York Times—a more than one-hundred-fold increase from approximately $300 million the prior year.

Polymarket, which received CFTC approval to serve US customers in September, is reportedly in discussions to raise additional capital at a $12 billion to $15 billion valuation, per Bloomberg.

The US market will decide the category

Both platforms now have US regulatory authorization and global ambitions. Kalshi secured the right to serve American users after prevailing in litigation against the CFTC last year, though it continues to face challenges from state regulators who contend its contracts constitute illegal gambling.

The data above suggests American traders generate more prediction market volume than the rest of the world combined. Whoever wins the US market will likely define the category.

Kalshi is betting that regulatory legitimacy and traditional finance integrations—Robinhood, bank accounts, potential brokerage partnerships—will pull mainstream users away from crypto rails. Polymarket is betting that liquidity begets liquidity: traders go where the depth is, and three years of accumulated market-making in high-profile contracts creates a moat that fiat on-ramps alone cannot breach.

Both will be tested over the next year as the platforms compete for the same users for the first time.

Balancer, the popular Automated Market Maker (AMM) and decentralized liquidity protocol, suffered a major hack early Monday morning around 9:30 a.m. UTC.

Attackers drained about $128 million in crypto across several chains, due to a bug in Balancer V2’s vault system. 

What Happened To Balancer?

The Balancer V2 vault acts as a central hub for liquidity, holding tokens for all Balancer pools. 

A specific function – manageUserBalance – didn’t properly check permissions, allowing attackers to withdraw funds they didn’t own.

Security teams from PeckShield, Cyvers, and Decurity spotted the issue and traced it to faulty access controls. 

The attackers started on Ethereum, then moved on to other networks using Balancer’s design or code.

This included prominent Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, and Optimism, as well as Berachain and Sonic. 

Assets, including StakeWise Staked ETH (osETH), Wrapped ETH (WETH), and Wrapped stETH (wstETH), were transferred into new wallets and began consolidating funds – potentially to launder them later.

As more networks reported losses, the running total exceeded $128M.

Why Did It Spread Across Protocols?

Balancer V2’s architecture places most tokens into one central vault to save gas, as well as make it easier to build new pool types. 

This structure improves efficiency and flexibility for developers, but it also introduces a single point of failure. 

When the vault’s access controls failed, the weakness didn’t remain isolated – every pool connected to that vault was suddenly exposed.

Several other protocols that reused or built on parts of Balancer’s open-source code were also exposed to the exploit.

This resulted in the following actions by projects based on Balancer’s code:

• Beets Finance reported roughly $3M affected.
• Beefy paused all products tied to Balancer V2.
• Berachain halted its entire chain while the core team prepared an emergency hard fork to protect around $12M in user funds.

Balancer’s Reaction

Balancer posted on X that engineering and security teams are treating the exploit as a top priority, however a post-mortem statement and report are still pending.

Market Reaction

Balancer (BAL) has now dropped more than 10% over the last 24 hours, as the hack coincides with a broader market sell-off.

The token is currently trading at $0.884, down from $0.983 on Sunday.

Crypto Hacks In 2025

Despite a quiet year for DeFi, crypto hacks have surged in 2025.

Chainalysis had already counted over $2.17B stolen by mid-2025 – already worse than the entirety of 2024. 

This Balancer hit adds to that total and shows a trend: attackers are going after both big protocols and individual wallets.

What Should Users Do?

It is recommended that users pause all interactions with Balancer V2 pools (and any related apps) until the team publishes confirmed fixes.

Check official project channels — such as X accounts, Discord servers, or Websites — for a list of affected pools, and avoid trading affected tokens until a resolution has been verified.

Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase Global, brushed off a viral moment from the company’s latest earnings call, writing on X that the episode “was fun” and “happened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a [prediction markets] link in the chat.”

The comment came a day after Armstrong ended Coinbase’s third-quarter earnings call by deliberately mentioning several crypto buzzwords, instantly deciding the outcome of multiple prediction markets that had been tracking whether he would say them.

lol this was fun – happened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a link in the chat https://t.co/tQiV3B9jUj

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) October 31, 2025

A sentence that moved the outcome

During the call, after discussing the exchange’s financial results, Armstrong said:

“I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call. And I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking and Web3 — make sure we get those in before the end of the call.”

That single line settled bets on two platforms — Kalshi and Polymarket — where traders had wagered on whether those terms would be used.

$80,933 in total volume was traded on Kalshi, while roughly $4,000 was traded on Polymarket. The outcome instantly paid those who had bet “yes” and wiped out the opposing side. One Polymarket user described the result as “Absolute cinema moment.”

Strong results overshadowed by a joke

The quip came at the end of an otherwise solid quarter for Coinbase.

• Net revenue: $1.9 billion, up 83 percent year over year.
• Net income: $432.6 million.
• Bitcoin holdings: 14,458 BTC, an increase of 2,772 from the prior quarter.

The company’s financials, however, were quickly eclipsed online by Armstrong’s closing words — a moment that briefly turned an investor call into an interactive event for crypto traders.

Both Kalshi and Polymarket promptly resolved the relevant contracts following the call. There has been no indication that either platform viewed the incident as a violation of its rules.

Armstrong’s follow-up post on X confirmed that the decision to speak the words was unscripted, coming only after someone on the team noticed the live wagers.

For most traders, the exchange chief’s remark became a quirky footnote — one that showed how even a few seconds on a corporate call can ripple across the growing world of real-money prediction markets.

The US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates today by 0.25%, bringing them down to 3.75% to 4%. 

The decision wasn’t unanimous, with 10 members voting in favor and two voting against. One of the disagreeing members favored a larger 0.50% increase, while the other objected to any increase at all. 

Bitcoin (BTC) fell 2% following the decision, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell ruled out the certainty of a further rate cut in December.

Alongside that move, the Fed announced plans to end quantitative tightening (QT) by December. 

It also seeks to restart Treasury purchases in a limited capacity to keep money flowing smoothly through financial markets.

Powell’s Balancing Act

The key takeaway from Wednesday’s meeting was Powell telling reporters that a December rate cut isn’t guaranteed, which disappointed traders hoping for a clear signal that more cuts were coming. 

He followed up by stating, “risks are to the upside for inflation and downside for employment,” signaling that the Fed is walking a tightrope between fighting inflation and keeping the job market strong.

Despite Powell’s cautious statements, prediction market Polymarket still predicts a 66% chance of a 0.25% rate cut in December – falling from a 90% chance before Wednesday’s meeting.

The odds of no change in rates are sitting at 31%, while the market predicts a 2.7% chance of a larger rate cut.

Markets Take It in Stride

Markets reacted to the news cautiously, with small sell-offs across the board.

Bitcoin briefly fell about 2% on the news, as investors digested Powell’s cautious tone. It bounced back quickly, finding support at $109,400 – suggesting traders still see longer-term upside if rates keep trending down.

Ether took a 4% dive, but also saw a quick recovery, touching as low as $3,840 before bouncing back as high as $3,955.

Both of the major cryptocurrencies have been ranging following strong recoveries from the October 11 flash-crash, sparked by further Trump tariffs against China.

Turning to the broader market, stocks gave up early gains, with the S&P 500 seeing a small drawdown of around 0.3%, while bond yields ticked up. 

The 10-year Treasury climbed to around 4.06%.

What Analysts Are Saying

The general takeaway has been that the Fed is shifting focus from inflation fears toward protecting jobs and market stability.

Analysts have called the rate cut an “insurance cut,” describing it as a small adjustment to steady the economy, rather than the start of a big rate-cutting cycle. 

They expect the end of QT to help stabilize short-term lending markets, which have been showing signs of strain. 

In past easing cycles, looser monetary conditions have tended to fuel risk appetite, including investment in digital assets. Regardless, the cautious tone might delay momentum for the near future.

With key data releases ahead – including November’s CPI and the December Fed meeting – traders will be bracing for volatility, as the market picture becomes clearer in the coming weeks.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the world’s largest bank by market cap, is set to let institutional clients use Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) as collateral for loans by the end of 2025.

The global program will use third-party custodians to safely hold the pledged crypto, according to people familiar with the plan.

It marks JPMorgan’s biggest move into digital assets since it announced in June 2025 that it would accept certain crypto ETFs as loan collateral.

From ‘Pet Rock’ to Legit Loan Collateral

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has long been a skeptic of Bitcoin, famously calling it a “hyped-up fraud” and even a “pet rock.” 

Regardless of those comments, JPMorgan is now treating crypto the same way it treats stocks, bonds, or gold under Dimon’s leadership – that is, as legitimate collateral for institutional lending.

He has since taken a softer stance, saying: “I don’t think we should smoke, but I defend your right to smoke,” and “I defend your right to buy Bitcoin – go at it.”

JPMorgan Already Supports Crypto ETFs as Collateral

This new program builds on what JPMorgan already launched in mid-2025. 

The bank currently lets clients borrow against Bitcoin ETFs, including BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC), and Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC).

Borrowers can draw up to 25% loan-to-value (LTV).

These ETF-backed loans give investors a compliant way to unlock liquidity without selling their crypto exposure. 

Now, they’re taking it further by allowing clients to pledge the actual underlying Bitcoin or Ether themselves – held securely by an approved custodian.

Wall Street’s Accelerating Crypto Pivot

JPMorgan’s move comes as other major banks also continue to wade deeper into the digital asset space:

• Morgan Stanley plans to open Bitcoin and Ether trading to its E*Trade customers in early 2026.
• State Street and BNY Mellon are expanding crypto custody and settlement services.
• Fidelity continues to offer crypto trading and retirement-account access.
• BlackRock now allows investors to swap Bitcoin directly for ETF shares, thanks to updated SEC rules.

What started as quiet experiments among big banks has now turned into a mainstream institutional product line.

Why Does It Matter?

The shift shows how crypto is becoming part of the traditional financial system’s foundation.

Bitcoin – once seen as a risk or competitor – is now being used by banks to manage risk, free up capital, and meet client demand.

JPMorgan actually explored lending against Bitcoin back in 2022, but put that use case on the backburner due to unclear regulations. 

Now, with rising client demand and more regulatory clarity, the idea is back – and they’re making it global.

Global Regulation Is Catching Up

Countries like those in the EU, Singapore, and the UAE already have clear rules for crypto custody and lending. 

In the US, new legislation to reform the crypto market structure is moving through Congress, giving large banks more confidence to act.

A Major Milestone

JPMorgan’s crypto collateral program marks a major milestone in the synthesis of traditional finance and crypto, especially coming from America’s largest bank.

The move is cementing Bitcoin and Ether as true blue-chip assets, signaling that crypto has become part of the system rather than just an alternative.

While Kalshi continues to make inroads on the blockchain, the prediction market has no intention of becoming crypto-centric.

Yes, Kalshi sees crypto as critical to its growth, but the company doesn’t have to make a binary decision, according to CEO Tarek Mansour. It doesn’t have to be either on-chain or off-chain.

Instead, the objective is to be accessible to crypto natives and mainstream users alike.

“Over time, I see kind of a seamless integration where there’s obviously gonna be an unchained flavor to this, and for crypto Twitter and the crypto native people, there’ll be an experience that they’re used to,” Mansour said on a recent episode of Jason Yanowitz’s Empire podcast.

Mansour, though, likens crypto to AI – if companies don’t embrace it, they’re putting themselves at a sizable disadvantage.

Five years from now, Mansour forecasts, “There’s gonna be companies that have adopted AI to improve the product experience, and companies that didn’t, which are gonna be left behind. And I think crypto is the same thing.”

Mansour said in its early stages, Kalshi decided against going on chain because such a path would have made regulation an even greater challenge. Now that legal hurdles have been cleared – there are many more ahead, of course – and the company is on an exponential trajectory for growth, the timing is right for crypto expansion.

“I think it’s the first time I feel like there’s openness to basically bring more of crypto and embed them into financial services,” he said.

Kalshi’s Latest Crypto Move

Kalshi announced on Monday a deal for Pyth Network to distribute its odds data across 100 blockchains.

The partnership puts Kalshi’s data into the hands of developers to build products related to sports, elections, interest rate decisions, and plenty more (Taylor Swift, anyone?).

The press release announcing the deal lists the World Series, Formula 1, and New York mayoral election as markets Pyth is already distributing on-chain.

The Pyth tie-up is just the latest effort by Kalshi to enhance its crypto relevancy, one area where many prediction market users and observers believe the company doesn’t yet measure up to Polymarket.

Competing Against Crypto Exchanges and Other Asset Classes

At the SEC/CFTC joint roundtable late last month, Kalshi’s Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan sat on a panel of fintech luminaries alongside the likes of CME Group’s Terrence Duffy, Nasdaq’s Adena Friedman, Kraken’s Arjun Sethi, and Intercontinental Exchange’s Jeffrey Sprecher (the lattermost of whom announced a $2 billion investment in Polymarket about a week later).

The dynamic was representative of a future in which trading on prediction market platforms spans far beyond yes/no binary markets.

“You’ll be an everything exchange,” Yanowitz inferred, “You’ll be able to trade tokens and stocks and everything on the platform. Is that the end goal?

 “… You’re not just competing against Polymarket and other prediction markets platforms. You’re competing against Coinbase and Nasdaq.”

 “I’ve always thought that the competition at the end of the day is the asset classes themselves,” Mansour affirmed, noting Kalshi translates to “everything” in Arabic.

“How do we make prediction markets and over time, Kalshi, which is gonna incorporate multiple asset classes, a bigger piece of the pie? And we have a long way to go, but I agree with you,” the CEO continued.

“I think all of these will intersect over time, because trading is trading. Is trading on a stock that fundamentally different from trading on politics? Not really if they’re both very liquid. It’s kind of the same thing.”

Kalshi has surpassed Polymarket in weekly trading volume, according to multiple reports.

Boosted by its US presence as football season has kicked off, Kalshi saw $871.8 million in trades over the past seven days, its best-ever week, according to Sporting Crypto.

Trading volume at Polymarket, which has yet to formally re-enter the US, is less than half of that, at $411.6 million.

Sports comprises about 80% of the volume on Kalshi.

Kalshi accounts for about 70% of trading volume across all prediction markets, up from a scant 2.4% a year ago, despite being live in only the US.

Kalshi’s surge comes as the company wants to go bigger in crypto, where Polymarket’s bread is buttered. Unlike Polymarket, its primary competitor in the prediction markets space, Kalshi sees relatively few transactions on the blockchain.

Crypto ‘next phase’ for Kalshi

A deeper push into crypto figures to put Kalshi on an exponentially quicker pace for growth.

That’s according to John Wang, Kalshi’s Head of Crypto, who says the company has its eye on a major blockchain expansion and calls crypto the “next phase of Kalshi’s growth.”

The 23-year-old crypto influencer and investor hired by Kalshi in August told The Block last week that Kalshi plans to be on “every large crypto application and exchange” within the next 12 months.

The realization of these aspirations will provide a boost to the crypto space, too, he believes.

While there are 86 event contracts listed under the “crypto” tab on Kalshi as of this writing, Wang says the company wants to increase that “by a ton” and asserts prediction markets could be the “Trojan horse” for users to get involved with crypto.

“I think in 12 months I would have failed my job if we couldn’t look the crypto community in the eyes and be like, ‘we genuinely made positive impact here, we brought in new audiences into crypto,'” Wang said.

Crypto key to competing in prediction markets

Just 10% of deposits on Kalshi are made with crypto, according to some estimates.

Kalshi allows users to deposit cryptocurrencies via blockchain platforms Zero Hash and Solana. While crypto deposits on Kalshi have traditionally converted into fiat, users can now fund their accounts directly from their Solana wallets.

With Polymarket’s imminent US re-entry a factor (the government shutdown may he holding it up, InGame surmises), Kalshi considers embracing crypto as essential to competing into the digital future.

“Any generational fintech company of this decade will be powered by crypto,” Wang said at a conference last week in Singapore.

Polymarket is reportedly considering creating its own native cryptocurrency or stablecoin. In an SEC filing by its parent company, Blockratize, “other warrants” and “other rights to acquire another security” were mentioned, prompting industry observers to anticipate the company is readying a launch of its own token.

Meanwhile, competition on the prediction markets landscape thickened last month by a partnership formed between DFS/sportsbook operator Underdog and digital currency exchange Crypto.com.

As the prediction market landscape evolves, it’s clear the main players see crypto as a critical to competing.

Restaking protocol Kelp has just launched “Gain” – an automated optimizer for yield farming and airdrop points participation across Layer 2 networks. 

Gain provides users with a hands-free way to earn additional returns on selected liquid staking tokens (LSTs) and its liquid restaking token (LRT), rsETH, through specialized vaults.

How Does Gain Work?

Gain users deposit supported assets such as rsETH into its vaults, which deploys these assets across partnered L2 networks for optimized yield farming and points earnings. 

These points are typically redeemable for an eventual airdrop of tokens when the respective platform launches a governance token. 

One of the key features of Gain is that it issues depositors with a liquid token, agETH, which represents a claim on their share of deposits within the vaults. agETH can be used within the wider DeFi ecosystem to further enhance returns.

Users can withdraw their funds from the vaults at any time, or simply sell their agETH on the open market to exit their position.

Flagship Vault

Gain’s flagship vault is its Airdrop Gain Vault, which allows users to participate in multiple L2 airdrops through a single, diversified strategy.

Users can deposit ETH, stETH, ETHx, and rsETH and receive agETH, a liquid reward-accruing token that can be used within the DeFi ecosystem.

To begin, the Airdrop Gain Vault is allocating 45% of deposits to Linea, 35% to Scroll, and 20% to Karak strategies. The vault will take a 2% share of rewards earned by users.

Strong Partnerships

Kelp hasn’t built Gain alone, instead partnering with several industry players for each aspect of the product. 

These partners include:

• August (previously Fractal Clearing): Provides the underlying infrastructure.
• Tulipa Capital: Management of Gain vault strategies to maximize returns for users. 
• LayerZero: Supporting interoperability across L2 networks.

The platform also integrates with DeFi partners such as Pendle, Balancer, and Uniswap, allowing users to leverage agETH in various yield strategies.

Conclusion

Gain makes it easy for anyone to participate in activity across various emerging layer 2 networks, earning points and boosting their chances of receiving future airdrops on those platforms. 

This can all be done while earning staking rewards on ETH, as well as EigenLayer Points and Kelp Miles on rsETH.

About Kelp

Kelp is a liquid restaking protocol with over $700 million in total value locked (TVL). It allows users to maximize their staking rewards by restaking ETH, stETH, and ETHx on EigenLayer, with user stakes represented as rsETH – a liquid restaking token that can be used throughout the DeFi ecosystem. 

rsETH integrates with various other DeFi platforms to provide liquidity pooling options for additional rewards and accessible swaps.