World Cup 2026 prediction markets could handle $10 billion amid regulatory pushback

Kalshi and Polymarket are entering the 2026 World Cup as prediction markets, but the bigger story for payments and high-risk operators is access: a growing list of governments is blocking or restricting these platforms. Bernstein estimates the tournament could add about $3 billion in betting volume and lift total turnover to as much as $10 billion.

1. According to Bernstein analysts, the 2026 World Cup could generate about $3 billion in additional betting and push prediction-market volume to as much as $10 billion. For PSPs, that is a meaningful stress test: not just traffic, but traffic concentrated around a single global event.
2. Recent market data show how large these platforms already are. Polymarket recorded about $2.8 billion in nominal volume across its international and U.S. platforms in the first week of June, up from $2.1 billion the week before, based on user-compiled Dune Analytics data. Kalshi reported about $4.5 billion over the same period, compared with $4.2 billion previously. Patrick Moley of Piper Sandler called the tournament “the Super Bowl every day” and said it had driven record daily volumes on Kalshi since the Friday before publication.
3. The catch is that access is increasingly jurisdiction-specific. Spain, Indonesia, and India recently joined the list of countries restricting Kalshi and Polymarket. Much of the European Union and large parts of Asia were already on that list before the latest additions, which means onboarding, payments routing, and geo-control are not abstract compliance topics here; they are the product.
4. Brazil is another clear example of the split between allowed and blocked activity. In April, the country shut down 27 prediction platforms, including Kalshi, whose co-founder Luana Lopes Lara is Brazilian. In Brazil, the activity is only allowed in the economic-financial sphere under the supervision of the Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM). Political and sports contracts are prohibited, except in regulated sports betting under the Ministry of Finance.
5. The growth of prediction markets has come from a legal gray zone between betting and derivatives. Some jurisdictions treat these contracts as gambling, others as securities or derivatives. That ambiguity helped startups scale quickly while regulators were still deciding what box to put them in. Dovey Wan, co-founder of Primitive Ventures and an investor in Opinion Labs, said these markets are moving through the familiar lifecycle of a new financial product: enthusiasts first, mass attention second, and then fights over legitimacy.