Kalshi’s second NFL Sunday cooled a touch from its splashy opener. According to PredictionNews’ in-house tracking data, total volume reached $240.35 million across the 16-game slate, down ~9.7% from Week 1’s tally of $266.1 million.
The shape of trading, however, stayed the same. In-game trading dominated with $178.20M (~74%), versus $62.15M pre-match. On a per-game basis, that’s about $15.0M per contest, including ~$11.1M live and ~$3.9M before kickoff.
Kalshi’s Week 3 tape: fewer dollars, more clicks
While the league-wide number stepped down from Week 1’s debut, Sunday still ranked among Kalshi’s biggest single days ever. Adhi Rajaprabhakaran put Kalshi at ~$204M exchange-wide for the day—third most all-time, behind the 2024 U.S. election peaks—alongside an estimated $3.1M in fee revenue, 88% of which came from sports.
CEO Tarek Mansour added a second milestone: a new single-day record for total trades, with 484,058 executions, edging past Election Day 2024’s 475,057. “Job’s not finished,” he posted.
Game scripts drive, and kill, NFL trading volume
If you’re wondering why headline volume dipped, one explanation could be the games themselves. Close games keep money moving, while blowouts temper live trading. Week 1 was unusually tight—12 of 16 games decided by one score (8 points or fewer) with an average margin of 7.56, one of the lowest Week 1 marks since the merger.
The second Sunday of the season wasn’t as uniformly close, as only 7-of-12 Sunday games landed within seven points while Monday Night Football split between a 1-point finish (Bucs-Texans, 20–19) and a more comfortable 11-point Chargers win (20–9).
Prediction market scoreboard
Another factor could be the rise of competition in the prediction markets industry, and more specifically sports prediction markets. Crypto.com partnered with Underdog to launch sports event contracts in 16 states on the Underdog Fantasy app — however, for now, they are only taking a small piece of the trading pie.
If you zoom out to the broader prediction market industry, Sunday volume topped roughly ~$283M, with Kalshi at ~$204M (~72% share), Polymarket at ~$58M, and Novig near ~$14M, plus smaller tallies from Crypto.com and SX Bet, again reported by Rajaprabhakaran.
Kalshi’s ~$3.1M fees estimate on Sunday is a reminder that the per-contract rake scales quickly in live environments, where traders churn multiple entries and exits over the course of a couple of hours.
That revenue success, however, leads to another question: In the long term, can Kalshi sustain a live-first product with fees that are no better than what one encounters at a sportsbook as more competitors line up?
What’s next for football trading?
Having already launched touchdown markets, Kalshi has been signaling a broader push into player props that have become so popular among sports bettors. It doubled down on Monday, self-certifying a configurable player-stat template that would allow markets like “Will <player> have <X> <stat> in <period>?” across passing, rushing, receiving, defensive, and special teams categories, interestingly with game/half/quarter timeframes.
Kalshi’s biggest competitor, Polymarket, has an imminent U.S. return, but the exact timing is still TBA. Its arrival will put pricing pressure on Kalshi and could fragment liquidity across exchanges.
Meanwhile, Sleeper Fantasy’s bid to register as a Futures Commission Merchant ran into a regulatory wall. Documents indicate CFTC staff instructed the NFA not to approve the application after NFA had deemed it complete—underscoring how, despite a more laissez-faire approach from Trump’s CFTC, regulatory hurdles remain a gating factor for would-be entrants.
In any case, Week 2 may have been marginally quieter for Kalshi in gross NFL trading volume, but barring courts stepping in, sports event contracts are here to stay and likely to get bigger as users adapt to the new exchange format throughout the season.
