In less than two years, prediction markets have grown from around 4,000 to over 600,000 active monthly users internationally, with a total market volume of almost $64 billion as of March 13. These platforms allow users to bet on everything — from sports to election results to the result of the war in Iran.

Polymarket and Kalshi are the leading prediction market platforms. On these platforms, users buy and sell bets predicting the outcomes of future events. The price of each bet reflects the market’s estimate of the probability that the event will occur. “If I think that Urban sandwiches will become two times larger by the end of the term, I could put that on Kalshi,” Dash Thompson ’26 said.

The probability of a bet changes in real time along with its value, which allows users to buy low and sell high, similar to stocks. Because these probabilities are driven only by speculation and the trading activity of other betters, the risks of losing bets is high. “It basically force-feeds [betters] all of these chances and predictions, mak[ing] it seem like your chances are better than they actually are,” Willow Stokes ’28 said. 

 Both Kalshi and Polymarket have used advertisements featuring odds for different events on social media platforms. “It’s everywhere. You can’t even go on TikTok without seeing Polymarket ads. There’s a lot of like political bait content where they’ll say some left-wing grifter s*** and then have it be a Kalshi ad,” Kenny Lasser ’26 said.

Kalshi and Polymarket have been successful in bringing young people to their platforms. A poll by Northwestern Mutual found that 32% of Gen Z are using or considering using prediction market platforms in 2026. “I bet on sports. I bet on economics. I bet on ChatGPT prices. I really bet on everything under the sun on Kalshi,” Thompson said. 

Multiple lawmakers have raised concerns over the ethics of betting on political topics. On Feb. 28, a market predicting the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, had reached over $54 million in bets. Regulations barring markets betting on a person’s death forced Kalshi to shut it down. “Betting [on] these topics really desensitizes everything and turns it into one big game instead of real life,” Stokes said.

Others argue that betting on real-world events is not a new phenomenon. “When a company is deciding, ‘How many people do I hire? How much inventory do I buy?’… effectively, what we’re doing is we’re betting on the future,” said math teacher Randy Li. “I think it’s too simple to just say it’s unethical to do. Predicting these things is a very important part of preparing yourself for the future.”

It is possible that some users are using insider information to bet on real-world events. Multiple bets were placed on Polymarket minutes before the first Israeli and American strikes on Iran. These bets resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in winnings after the strikes hit.

The ability to bet on serious events can motivate people to act differently. “We are incentivizing people economically to make these sorts of complicated moral decisions,” Li said. “There’s an incentive to go kill people and bomb people so that you could potentially make money off of … the market going down.”

However, the risks of incentivising insider trading are not unique to prediction markets. “Insider trading is nothing new. Obviously, Kalshi does provide a way for people to insider trade, but that’s not any different than what the government already does through [awarding] contracts,” Lasser said.

As prediction markets continue to grow in popularity, it’s unclear whether the benefits will be distributed equally. 

“Every mechanism for making money, in general, favors the rich because they have [the] most access to information [and] resources,” Li said. “So, in the end, [prediction markets] will only widen the wealth gap, but I don’t think that’s the fault of gambling. That’s just how everything works.”