Per CoinGecko’s 2026 Q2 Crypto Industry Report, prediction markets, where people trade contracts based on real-world outcomes like elections and sports, saw $113.8 billion in volume in the second quarter of this year, up by a whopping 48.7% from Q1.
During the same three months, spot trading volume on the top 10 centralized crypto exchanges fell by 27.9%, and prices of leading assets like Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) shed 25.4%, with Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) faling 14.2%
Is this a case of unlucky timing for crypto, or is there a deeper problem? This dynamic isn’t what it appears to be The prediction market Kalshi’s share of outcome markets volume climbed from 42.4% in Q1 to 58.9% in Q2, while Polymarket saw its share decline from 35.8% to 30.2%. The capital that’s at stake and fueling the competition between those platforms is not primarily sourced from crypto wallets.
Bitget Wallet’s recent analysis of 857,000 Polymarket users over 90 days found that 60% had never touched on-chain trading of crypto before joining the prediction market. In other words, these prediction markets are attracting fresh money as much as they might be siphoning it from crypto, so the crypto sector overall is probably losing significantly less of the speculative capital flows available than the divergence implies. To be sure, crypto prices have tanked.