As the cryptocurrency sector cools, one-time token traders are predicting big things from prediction markets.
That’s according to a report Monday (Jan. 26) from Bloomberg News, which says that interest in this space has gone from a fringe activity to an industry in which platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi have seen their weekly notional volume jump from $500 million in June to nearly $6 billion this month.
Among the former crypto investors moving into the predictions space is 28-year-old Canadian Nikshep Saravanan, who is working on HumanPlane, a platform designed for researching and tracking prediction markets on subjects ranging from politics to sports.
“Here I can do a lot more with no capital,” he said. “There’s so much more interest here.”
The report characterizes this shift as a sign of both opportunity and fatigue, as bitcoin has fallen nearly 30% since a record high in October, a crash that has drained energy and moved attention away from the crypto space. Crypto exchange app downloads declined sharply during 2025, Bloomberg added, while the prediction markets jumped.
Installs of Polymarket rose from 30,000 in January to 400,000 by December, the report said, citing data from Sensor Tower, while Kalshi’s installs soared from 80,000 to 1.3 million in the same time frame. By contrast, downloads of Binance — the world’s largest crypto exchange — fell by more than half.
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Writing about the predictions space last week, PYMNTS described the market as a “version of the casino” for the information economy.
In addition to the likes of Polymarket and Kalshi, as well as by traditional iGaming, sports betting and even retail investing and crypto platforms like Robinhood, DraftKings, Coinbase and Kraken, global financial institutions are also eyeing the market.
For example, Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon said earlier this month that the bank is looking into how it might become involved in prediction markets.
Despite this momentum, PYMNTS argued that prediction markets can still “fail in unpredictable ways,” especially with the number of questions exploding faster than the system’s ability to address them. While straightforward markets can be settled automatically, edge cases such as ambiguous outcomes, contested facts or politically sensitive events can require judgment.
“The result is a ceiling on complexity,” PYMNTS added. “Markets work best when the answer is obvious and uncontested. But those questions involving interpretation, causality or partial outcomes are becoming the hardest issues to resolve.”
