Prediction markets are no longer a niche corner of crypto. Monthly trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket combined has risen from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to around $24 billion in April 2026 — surpassing the average monthly amount wagered through US legal sportsbooks. Industry projections estimate that prediction market volumes could reach $240 billion annually in 2026, with longer-term forecasts pointing toward the trillion-dollar mark.
The growth is being driven by retail, not institutions. Roughly 82% of users on Polymarket traded under $10,000 across Q1 2026, with the majority of transactions averaging $35 per trade. These are mainstream users: people who want to put capital behind their convictions on sports, politics, and crypto prices. And they're arriving on platforms that, in many cases, are not set up to serve them efficiently.
What most of those users don't think about is the infrastructure underneath. The wallet connection that worked first time. The USDC deposit that settled in seconds. The payout that landed before the next event kicked off. The compliance check that happened without them ever knowing it occurred.
That's what WalletConnect enables.
What Are Prediction Markets?
Prediction markets are platforms where users buy and sell shares in the outcome of future events. Each contract represents a yes or no position on a specific question: "Will France win the World Cup?" or "Will Bitcoin hit $150,000 before the end of 2026?" or "Will the Fed cut rates in September?"
The price of a share reflects the crowd's implied probability. A "yes" trading at $0.19 means the market collectively gives that outcome a 19% chance. If the event resolves in your favour, the share pays out $1. If not, it pays $0. The result is a continuous, real-time probability signal built from the financial convictions of thousands of participants: not polls, not pundits.
What makes these markets powerful is the incentive structure. Participants aren't sharing opinions; they're staking capital. That alignment between conviction and risk produces more accurate forecasts than surveys or expert commentary, which is why mainstream outlets including the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek now report prediction market odds alongside traditional analysis.
Global prediction market trading volume surged more than 400% from 2024 to 2025, reaching nearly $64 billion. Monthly trading volume increased more than a hundredfold from early 2024, jumping from less than $100 million a month to more than $13 billion in December 2025. As of mid-2026, a structural baseline of $5 billion to $8 billion weekly is emerging, supported by a 20x increase in post-event floor volumes compared to 2024 levels.
The Platforms Driving the Market
Polymarket is the world's largest decentralised prediction market, operating on Polygon with USDC settlement. In October 2025, ICE/NYSE announced a strategic investment of up to $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion valuation. It re-entered the US market in early 2026 following CFTC regulatory clarity. Polymarket commands an estimated 70–80% of on-chain prediction market volume.
Kalshi is a fully CFTC-regulated Designated Contract Market with nationwide US access. A March 2025 partnership with Kalshi brought Robinhood's prediction markets hub to its 27 million funded brokerage accounts, with Super Bowl-related volumes alone exceeding $1 billion. Bitcoin is its largest source of user payment deposits.
Myriad embeds prediction markets into media and content ecosystems. Built by Dastan, formed from the merger of Decrypt and Rug Radio, it has over 400,000 active traders and $100 million in volume on BNB Chain. It became the native prediction market on Trust Wallet in December 2025, reaching a potential audience of 220 million users.
The sector is also broadening structurally, with Hyperliquid's attention markets and Zora's social trend trading on Solana adding new surfaces. The common infrastructure need across all of them: reliable wallet connections, smooth deposit flows, compliant payouts, and the regulatory scaffolding to operate at scale.
The volume numbers tell you prediction markets are scaling. What they don't show is what a user actually does when they arrive on a platform, and where the experience breaks down without the right infrastructure.
There are four moments that matter: connecting a wallet, funding an account, getting paid out, and doing all of it inside a compliant environment. Get any of the first three wrong and you lose users to friction. Get the fourth wrong and you lose the right to operate.
Use Case 1: Connecting a Wallet
What the user does: Opens Polymarket or Myriad, taps "Connect Wallet," scans a QR code or selects their mobile wallet, and within seconds has a live session with access to every market on the platform.
What WalletConnect enables: Every connection on Polymarket, Myriad, and across the broader DeFi-adjacent prediction market ecosystem runs through the WalletConnect Network. Users connect mobile wallets like Trust Wallet and Rainbow, or any WalletConnect-compatible desktop setup, through a single consistent standard across 700+ compatible wallets.
The consistency matters more than it appears. A user on Polymarket on Tuesday and Myriad on Thursday encounters the same connection flow: same QR code standard, same session approval, same wallet. That familiarity reduces abandonment at the first step.
Security is non-negotiable at this layer. Every WalletConnect session is encrypted end-to-end using symmetric keys derived from the connection itself. The relay infrastructure passes encrypted payloads without being able to read them. Session data is never stored. Connections and transaction approvals cannot be intercepted or spoofed.
Over 300 million connections have been processed through the WalletConnect Network, with 45 million users trusting it to power their onchain experience.
Use Case 2: Funding an Account (Deposits and Top-Ups)
What the user does: Decides to deposit $500 to trade. They have USDC but it's on Ethereum mainnet. The platform runs on Polygon. They need to move funds before placing a single trade.
What WalletConnect Pay enables: This is where most prediction market platforms lose users. The majority of Polymarket transactions are dominated by micro users averaging $35 per trade. These are not crypto-native power users who know how to bridge. They're retail participants who want to put $50 on a sports result or a political outcome and they will not complete a multi-step bridge flow to do it.
The gap between having funds and having those funds available to trade requires: finding a bridge, approving a transaction, paying gas on two networks, waiting for multiple confirmations, and checking whether funds actually arrived. A meaningful share of users who intend to deposit don't finish this process. They leave before placing a single trade, and the platform never sees them again.
WalletConnect Pay abstracts all of that into one in-app step. The user selects an amount and a source: stablecoin from an exchange wallet, a self-custodial holding, or a fiat onramp. WalletConnect Pay handles cross-chain routing, settlement, and confirmation through regulated partners. No bridge UI, no leaving the platform, no tutorial required. The user sees a simple deposit flow. The platform sees a funded user ready to trade.
Use Case 3: Receiving a Payout
What the user does: A position resolves in their favour. They want their winnings quickly, cleanly, without navigating the same friction they hit on the way in.
What WalletConnect Pay enables: Payouts are deposits in reverse, and the same infrastructure applies. All the user does is connect their wallet and sign a gasless transaction. That single step does two things at once: it confirms they control the wallet (giving the platform the proof it needs for compliant outbound settlement) and it removes the manual address copy-paste that most payout flows still depend on today. No pasted strings, no wrong-address risk, no leaving the product.
For users, a smooth payout is what turns a single winning trade into a habit. For operators, it's the retention mechanism that keeps funded accounts active. A platform that pays out quickly and cleanly is one users return to. A platform with a slow, manual, uncertain payout experience loses them after the first win: the worst possible moment to create a negative impression.
The compliance layer matters equally on the payout side. Sanctions screening, Travel Rule data, and AML checks apply to outbound transfers as much as inbound ones. WalletConnect Pay carries those requirements into the payout flow, so operators aren't exposed at the point of settlement.
Use Case 4: Operating in a Compliant Environment
What the user does: Nothing visible. But behind every session, deposit, and payout, a set of compliance checks is running and whether those checks are in place determines whether the platform can operate in regulated markets at all.
What WalletConnect enables: The regulatory direction is clear. MiCA enforcement is live in the EU. The CFTC framework for event contracts is established in the US. While there have been regulatory headwinds — Nevada gaming regulators suing Kalshi and the Arizona AG filing lawsuits in early 2026 — the markets have continued to grow. The platforms that will navigate this environment are the ones that built the compliance layer before they needed it.
WalletConnect's architecture addresses compliance at multiple layers:
Encrypted sessions. Symmetric key encryption derived from the connection itself. The relay infrastructure cannot read session payloads. Nothing is stored. Wallet connections and transaction approvals cannot be intercepted or spoofed.
Travel Rule compliance. WalletConnect Pay supports the originator and beneficiary data fields required under the Travel Rule for transfers above threshold. For platforms operating under MiCA or equivalent frameworks, that data layer is non-negotiable and having it built into the payment infrastructure from day one is a significant advantage over retrofitting it later. Coinbase and Sumsub both use WalletConnect for exactly this layer.
Transaction screening. Operators can flag high-risk wallets at the point of deposit, before funds reach the platform. Catching a sanctioned address on the way in is far less costly than finding it in an audit.
Geoblocking and access controls. Polymarket applies geoblocking at the contract level. WalletConnect's architecture lets operators enforce jurisdiction restrictions at the connection layer: at the point of wallet connection, not just at the IP level.
What This Means for Prediction Market Operators
The infrastructure decision you make now determines whether you can operate in regulated markets in two years.
Prediction markets are scaling fast, with volume surging to $26 billion in March 2026, a 95% increase from $1.2 billion in the same month of 2025. The addressable user base is mainstream retail. The regulatory environment is tightening across every major market. The platforms that will dominate this space are the ones making the right infrastructure decisions now, not the ones retrofitting compliance or losing users to deposit friction they could have solved.
WalletConnect is already part of the prediction market stack. Polymarket and Myriad both run on the WalletConnect Network. WalletConnect Pay extends that to the full financial layer: deposits, payouts, and the compliance architecture that a regulated, scaled prediction market requires.
The question for operators is how much of that stack they want to use.
Learn more about WalletConnect Pay: walletconnect.com/pay