Bernstein now projects that prediction-market trading volume will reach $10 trillion annually by 2035, a major upward revision that replaces the investment bank's April forecast of $1 trillion by 2030. The new estimate is roughly 24 times the $410 billion in volume the firm expects the industry to process in 2026.

In a note to clients on Tuesday, Bernstein analysts led by Gautam Chhugani said they expect volumes to compound at roughly 70% a year through 2035. Industry-wide trading has already grown from about $50 billion in 2025 to roughly $300 billion in the first eight months of 2026, with Kalshi and Polymarket together already processing hundreds of billions of dollars in volume. In other words, the industry has already booked roughly six times its entire 2025 volume in just eight months of 2026.

Financial contracts set to overtake sports

A central pillar of the revised forecast is a shift in what traders are betting on. Sports made up 61% of prediction-market volume in 2025, and Bernstein expects that share to fall to 38% by 2035. Contracts tied to crypto, stocks, and commodities—grouped together as "financial assets"—are projected to grow from 12% to 49% of the market, making them the largest category for the first time.

"We expect new products such as KPI markets, which allow users to trade a single corporate metric, such as production, deliveries, or subscriber growth, rather than the stock price itself," the analysts wrote. In practice, that means betting on whether a company ships more units in a given quarter without having to buy or short its stock.

"Further, perp futures are expanding from crypto to commodities and single stock perps," they added. Perpetual futures are contracts with no expiration date, allowing a trader to hold a position indefinitely rather than closing it out on a set day.

How prediction markets work

Prediction markets let people trade "yes" or "no" contracts on whether something will happen, from a Federal Reserve rate decision to a company's earnings. Each contract settles at $1 if the event occurs and $0 if it does not, so the contract's price functions as a running measure of the odds. Read that way, a contract trading at 70 cents implies roughly 70% odds that the event happens.

Kalshi's expanding lead

Bernstein's data show crypto's share of Kalshi's volume jumped from under 5% in January to about 20% in August. Commodity trading on the platform grew from less than $2 million across all of 2025 to roughly $590 million so far in 2026, including $410 million in August alone. Kalshi now accounts for about 60% of industry volume, up from 35% a year ago. That leaves roughly 40% of industry volume for the rest of the field, including Polymarket.

A tenfold revision

In April, Bernstein projected a comparatively modest $1 trillion market by 2030, up from $51 billion in 2025. At the time, the analysts argued growth would come less from bigger sports bets and more from institutions moving in.

"We expect an institutional market to develop around economics, business, and political contracts, as investors seek more direct and discrete exposure to events," they wrote at the time. They also pointed to the infrastructure behind the shift: "Increasing regulatory clarity at the federal level...is expanding the addressable market, while blockchain-based tokenization and integration with crypto markets is enabling global liquidity, long-tail event creation and participation from institutions."

The deadline for that tenfold growth has now stretched from 2030 to 2035. Whatever Bernstein tracked in the data over the summer made its April forecast look conservative.

Bernstein estimates that crypto, stocks, and commodities alone represent a $700 trillion pool of possible bets today, growing to $900 trillion by 2035. Even if prediction markets capture just 0.5% of that pool, it would work out to $4.7 trillion a year in volume on financial contracts alone, without counting a single sports wager. Even at $10 trillion, the new target implies capturing only a little over 1% of that pool—by Bernstein's own math, the format remains a small slice of the broader financial landscape.

Robinhood positioning for the shift

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is already preparing for that change. "We're already seeing other categories like crypto taking a disproportionate share," he told CNBC this week. "I think within a few years, sports will actually be in the minority, similar to active trading at large."

Robinhood's own event-contract business posted a tenfold jump in revenue, to $156 million, in the second quarter of 2026. Bernstein has separately projected that prediction markets will become a meaningful earner for Robinhood this year as crypto categories keep taking a bigger share of the platform's trading. The quarter is an early, platform-level echo of the industry-wide mix shift Bernstein projects.

Regulatory clarity remains distant

Bernstein said firm regulatory clarity for U.S. sports prediction markets is unlikely before 2027 or 2028, citing conflicting court rulings over whether these contracts count as federally regulated derivatives or state-regulated gambling. That legal question is the clearest milestone for readers to watch, since any ruling would define how sports contracts can scale in the U.S. Notably, the categories driving this year's growth—crypto and commodities—are not the sports contracts at the center of that dispute.

Until that question is resolved, the industry is on pace to close 2026 at $410 billion in volume—a figure Bernstein now treats as a floor, not a ceiling.