🖋️ This roundup was written and edited by Omar El Safy and Pet Berisha
On Thursday, we published Do Parlays Pay the Bills? Part 3, where we looked at how, in the first 2 weeks of August 2026, combos made up 42% of Kalshi's notional volume and 10% of cash. Novig opened with the same shape in week one, which is in story four.
And earlier this month, we released our Q2 2026 report. Prediction markets traded $111 billion in the quarter, more than 2024 and 2025 combined. Over 70 pages of charts, and it is free. Read below 👇
Cantor Fitzgerald began brokering institutional block trades in Kalshi event contracts on 19th August 2026, putting the venue in front of roughly 3,000 institutional clients.
Susquehanna Predictions now price and provide the liquidity.
Cantor are among the first full-service investment banks to organise block trades in event contracts on a CFTC-regulated exchange.
Blocks matter because they let a fund move size without walking through a thin order book in public.
The Wall Street Journal reported what the funds actually want to trade. Weather, commodity prices, corporate earnings, AI supply chain risk, and iPhone sales.
The same week, an academic team at the quant fund AQR was reported to be researching prediction markets trading strategies, and River Markets raised $8.5 million to build prime brokerage across Kalshi and Polymarket.
Kalshi filed two perpetual futures contracts with the CFTC on 18 August 2026. US500 tracks MerQube's index of 500 companies listed and domiciled in the United States.
Both are cash-settled with no expiry date.
A periodic funding payment between longs and shorts keeps the price tied to the reference index, which is the mechanism crypto exchanges have used for a decade.
Neither is approved yet, and Kalshi say they will list only once the Commission authorises them.
The CFTC cleared Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual in late May 2026, and Bloomberg reported the perps drove more than $5.5 billion volume in their first two weeks.
CME are already in court over it. In June 2026, they sued the CFTC and its chair, arguing perpetual futures are swaps under Dodd-Frank rather than futures, and that the agency's approval hands Kalshi a lighter rulebook.
Polymarket US Parlays launched API-only beta on 5th August 2026
On 20 August 2026, two things happened.
Polymarket US opened parlays to every customer after an app update. Previously, they had self-certified the contracts with the CFTC back in May 2026 and run an API-only beta since 5 August 2026.
Polymarket International has already had parlays since the World Cup.
On its first full session open to everyone, 20 August 2026, parlays traded $15.05 million of notional volume on $2.19 million of handle. The next day, it rose to $39.3 million.
Kalshi, the same day, started charging maker fees on parlays for the first time.
For context, in an ordinary Kalshi market, a maker pays a quarter of the taker fee.
On combos, they had paid nothing at all.
Now they pay half on combos.
It is now twice the rate makers pay anywhere else on the exchange.
Why? One reason could be that a Kalshi combo does not sit on an order book.
Users create a customised combo, Kalshi broadcasts a request for quote (RFQ), and a handful of professional desks price the combo on demand.
Fair value is just the leg prices multiplied together. The gap between that and the quote you are shown is the real cost of the parlay, and until last week almost all of it went to the desk on the other side (RFQ) rather than to Kalshi.
Findings from Oddpool
In a report into Kalshi's RFQ layer, Oddpool found five market makers quoting combos and eight quoting the single-market book, with zero overlap between the two groups, and only one of the five combo quoters actually pricing the correlation between legs; the rest simply multiply leg prices together.
That tells you two things:
1) RFQ layer isn't one liquidity pool but two separate desks sharing an API
2) Pricing sophistication on the combo side is thin.
With just five quoters, no public order book, and no way to check their prices, a fee levied on those makers is more likely to be passed onto customers, rather than to market makers.
How did market makers respond?
Before the fees: market makers were happy to offer fairly tight prices (small spreads). After the fees went live (the vertical dashed line): those same market makers started quoting wider prices, roughly 0.42 cents more per contract on average. Source
The new fee comes as no surprise given how combo-dominated Kalshi's volume has become; they were 42% of Kalshi's notional volumes for the first two weeks of August 2026, and 10% of the cash handle, with taker fees on them totalling $24.9 million in the first 16 days of August alone. We covered this in our own model of the trade reports.
🧠 Kalshi is moving upstream. Earlier in the year, Sportico put the total cost of a Kalshi parlay at 14.7%, of which only about 4.5 points is the exchange fee. The rest, more than double, is the market maker's spread. So the maker fee increase helps Kalshi reach for a bigger share of the pie.
Novig launched nationwide on 4 August 2026, less than two months after the CFTC approved them as a designated contract market. They are a sports-only prediction market
They reported more than $125 million of first-week volume, above what Kalshi, Polymarket US, Underdog and DraftKings' DKeX each accumulated in their opening weeks. It makes them the fourth-largest regulated prediction market in the country.
The first seven days saw $127.9 million in notional volume against $44.8 million in handle, the cash actually staked, across 691,622 trades at an average price of 35¢. Over the 19 days to 22 August 2026: $396.9 million notional, $138.8 million handle.
🗞 General
Reuters: research by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective flagged 152 Polymarket wallets that made $8 million on military and defence markets at a 97.2% win rate, part of 556 accounts it calls Orcas (Read more here)
Kalshi have spent $17.7 million on national TV since September 2025, and have just put out a J Balvin campaign off the back of a World Cup spike in Spanish-speaking users (Read more here)
Kalshi published their own calibration study across 2.3 million markets since 2021: most accurate on elections and economics, weakest on sports (Read more here)
Stan Druckenmiller revealed a $23 million position on Hyperliquid, as it moves onto ground Polymarket thought was theirs (Read more here)
NBC News: election officials fear prediction markets will fuel distrust in the midterms, now less than 100 days away (Read more here)
Fortune: a prediction market executive expects the fight with the states to reach the Supreme Court by June (Read more here)
ADI Predictstreet's $6.9 billion blockchain, backed by an Abu Dhabi conglomerate, is generating $7,248 a day (Read more here)
🤝 Announcements & Partnerships
Lazio and Polymarket tore up a record €22 million shirt deal four months into it, by mutual consent, after Italy's regulator blacklisted the site on 27 July 2026. Polymarket still pay the full 2026/27 season, roughly half the contract, and both sides left the door open if Italy's position changes (Read more here)
Only two teams across the three big US leagues have signed with a prediction market operator. The NBA and NFL are waiting on the courts, and owners may be waiting until 2028 (Read more here)
NEXTPredict paid $12,000 for $3 million of cover against JFK flight cancellations the day before their October 2026 summit, with Susquehanna making the market. The first conference hedged on a prediction market (Read more here)
ETHTaipei have added an Institution Day on 14 September 2026 aimed at banks and financial institutions, with Polymarket and Uniswap among the first speakers named (Read more here)
Kalshi announced an exclusive US streaming and data deal with Catalist Sports covering 65,000 tennis matches a year, Ligue 1 and Série A, then pulled the announcement, saying details had not been mutually confirmed (Read more here)
⚖️ Regulation & Legal
Kalshi have started blocking Washington users from sports, elections and politics, culture, tech and science, and mentions. What is left is commodities, climate, economics and finance, and they have until 2 September 2026 to geofence it or pay $120,000 a day (Read more here)
South Korea order ISPs to block Polymarket as a substantive illegal gambling environment, and Denmark block it alongside 97 other sites, taking the count past 30 jurisdictions (Read more here)
The CFTC seat Kalshi, Polymarket and DraftKings on its new Innovation Advisory Committee, days before the roundtable where CME attacked them (Read more here)
Novig, three weeks into trading, pre-emptively sue Wisconsin's attorney general to stop him enforcing the state gambling law (Read more here)
A Connecticut judge rules the CFTC cannot override the court, and denies Kalshi's injunction (Read more here)
Nevada seek $120,000 a day in fines while Kalshi accuse the state's investigators of breaking federal law to get round the geofence (Read more here)
SafeBets want to cull their best-performing predictors from a user base built on sports and politics (Read more here)
🤫 Whispers
ICE say they may put more money into Polymarket's new round at above $20 billion, having already taken their stake to $1.64 billion (Read more here)
Bloomberg: Yesha Yadav calls Kalshi's reported $40 billion valuation “staggering” (Read more here)
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