NFL Kickoff Drives Higher Predictions Market Volume Than The US Election

Kalshi founder Tarek Mansour claims the 2025 NFL season has spiked trading volume on the platform. User activity reached $440 million in four days, outpacing the gambling frenzy over Trump’s election.

Sports gambling is a lucrative market, but non-crypto apps have firmly established themselves. Potential competition could be an interesting test case for Web3’s advantages over pure fiat platforms.

Kalshi Bets on the NFL

As the 2024 Presidential Election intensified, prediction markets reported a massive surge in user activity. This brought worldwide notoriety to platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, helping ensure their success in 2025.

Today, however, Kalshi’s founder identified an even bigger market for these firms: gambling on the NFL:

Kalshi has done $441m of volume since NFL kickoff.NFL week 1 is equal to a US election.Probably nothing.

— Tarek Mansour (@mansourtarek_) September 8, 2025

The NFL’s 2025 season began less than a week ago, and Kalshi is already reporting these immense trade volumes. Polymarket, its counterpart, also has huge activity; the category for Super Bowl champion already has over $45 million in bets.

On both platforms, many individual games have more than $1 million.

Crypto has intersected with football on several noteworthy occasions, especially the Web3-themed ads in 2022’s “Crypto Bowl.” However, if prediction markets like Kalshi start focusing on NFL audiences for future growth, it could represent a sturdy connection.

Ad buys, although lucrative, are an incidental tie, while gambling can form a symbiotic relationship.

Will the Industry Fight Back?

If Kalshi wants to enter the NFL gambling market, though, it faces stiff competition. Since the US liberalized laws on app-based gambling platforms, this market has ballooned to around $50 billion.

Already, some of these outlets are covering Kalshi’s purported deficiencies compared to non-crypto platforms.

Still, these Web3 prediction markets have a few key advantages of their own. Polymarket won an ersatz US approval from the CFTC last week, and Kalshi also has significant regulatory ties.

Although some outlets have complained that Kalshi has used the NFL’s copyrighted logos without permission, obstacles like that might not halt the sector’s growth.

In short, this will be an interesting test case for how well crypto can compete with pure fiat institutions.

How much will global audiences want to gamble on American football, a sport with limited popularity outside the US? Does crypto have a significant advantage to compete in this massive market? Will regulatory backlash eventually ensue?

Whatever happens, Kalshi has plenty of reasons to pursue the NFL gambler audience. This could become a core component of these prediction markets’ business models if successful.