Kalshi Claims Annualized Trading Volume of $100B, Critics Doubt That

Earlier this week, prediction markets giant Kalshi announced that it had crossed $100 billion in annualized trading volume, but industry experts criticized that, saying the figure was derived from taking data from a strong week and projecting it across the full year.

Critics Dispute Kalshi’s $100B Claim

If Kalshi’s claims of $100 billion in annual trading volume are true, they would mark a 400% increase compared with Kalshi’s performance in the prior year. Annual trading volume means the total dollar value of all contracts traded on the Kalshi platform over twelve months. If the number is true, it would imply a robust market activity, placing Kalshi on par with mid-sized traditional financial exchanges by transaction volume.

However, upon further inspection, other experts have noted that Kalshi has come up with this figure by extrapolating it from the traded volume of just one week. Kalshi reported $1.98 billion in trading volume for the week of December 29 to January 4. To project the $100 billion annual estimate, the company multiplied this weekly total by 52. However, the week included the final weekend of the NFL regular season and the College Football Playoff quarterfinals, which provided a strong boost to the company’s working volume, as betting increased.

What Fueled Growth in Late 2025?

It seems that various factors have helped Kalshi achieve such high trading volumes in the past week. For starters, early in December, Kalshi also tokenized versions of its markets on Solana. The platform recorded 800,000 downloads that month, although it remains unclear how many of those users became active depositors and traders, which would have inflated Kalshi’s trading volume from last week.

Furthermore, the company boosted liquidity through several third-party integrations. In mid-December, Coinbase, which has 9.3 million monthly transacting users in Q3, launched its prediction market product in partnership with Kalshi. 

The sports calendar and the fact that over 90% of Kalshi’s activity is linked to it have also played a huge role in the company seeing such a large trading volume increase in the past week. The last quarter of the year is typically the busiest, as there are overlapping football and basketball seasons.

Sports betting activity usually falls by one-third to one-half during the summer compared with peak periods. For example, in early December, Kalshi reported weekly volumes of around $1.3 billion. However, this then surged as the year came to a close. Just on January 5, the platform saw $403 million in trading volume. This was largely fueled by a packed schedule of NFL games, including the Ravens vs. Steelers matchup that was decided on the final play.

However, now that the sports seasons are over, and Kalshi has not yet announced any more big deals and partnerships, as it did in December, it remains unclear if the company can maintain the close to $2 billion weekly trading volumes that are used to extrapolate its yearly figures.