Polymarket tops $1 billion in annualized revenue as prediction market boom accelerates

Just six weeks after opening its U.S. exchange, Polymarket has reached a milestone few crypto startups have. The prediction market platform has surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue, according to an exclusive report from CNBC. The milestone marks another sign that prediction markets have become one of the hottest corners of online trading.

The milestone arrives at a time when interest in prediction markets is spilling well beyond crypto circles. Retail traders are placing bets on everything from elections and sporting events to central bank decisions and geopolitical developments. Wall Street is paying attention too.

“Prediction market platform Polymarket’s annualized revenue are now well above $1 billion,” the company told CNBC on Friday.

The timing is striking. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had assembled a small internal team to build a prediction markets product, code-named Arena, in a move aimed at competing with Polymarket and Kalshi. If Meta follows through, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies could soon enter a market that barely existed in the mainstream a few years ago.

Prediction markets have grown from a niche experiment rooted in crypto and academic finance into a business attracting billions of dollars in trading activity. That surge has fueled growth across platforms that let users buy and sell contracts tied to future events, turning real-world news into tradable assets.

Polymarket’s latest revenue milestone follows the launch of its U.S. exchange roughly six weeks ago, giving American customers direct access to the platform, the source told Reuters.

“Polymarket is a product-led company,” a spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “We spent the last five years building the world’s largest prediction market, and understanding how people engage with markets at scale. We are applying those learnings to our U.S. platform, where our focus is on intuitive market experiences, institutional-grade liquidity and a consumer experience that sets the standard for the category.”

The company is broadening its reach beyond retail traders. Prediction market operators are courting hedge funds and institutional investors that see event-based contracts as another way to express market views or hedge risk.

Today, Polymarket users can trade contracts tied to a wide range of events. Active markets include wagers on the winner of the FIFA World Cup, geopolitical developments such as whether the Strait of Hormuz will close, political races, inflation data, interest rate decisions, and corporate announcements.

Polymarket’s rise has been swift. Founder Shayne Coplan launched the company in 2020 as an alternative to traditional betting markets. Early backing came from investors including Polychain Capital and Founders Fund, helping the startup raise roughly $279 million before its landmark deal with Intercontinental Exchange.

That changed last year when the New York Stock Exchange’s parent, Intercontinental Exchange, agreed to invest $2 billion in Polymarket. The deal marked one of the strongest endorsements yet of prediction markets from a major financial institution and pushed Coplan into the ranks of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, Reuters reported.

Crossing $1 billion in annualized revenue adds another milestone to Polymarket’s growth story. It signals that prediction markets are no longer viewed simply as crypto experiments. They are becoming a new category of financial platform that blends trading, information, and public sentiment into markets that move in real time.