If you’re prone to scrolling for a frankly unhealthy number of hours per day, you might have recently seen a couple names pop up with borderline-bizarre frequency: Polymarket and Kalshi. These sites bill themselves as “prediction markets,” but the activity they center around is, on no uncertain terms, gambling. Polymarket and Kalshi shroud this in marketspeak, allowing people to buy up yes/no “contracts” on real-world events and adopting a peer-to-peer approach instead of heralding down edicts about house odds, with prices instead set by trades a la financial markets. But the sites still take a cut of transactions, and people are still, in aggregate, betting millions.
Polymarket and Kalshi let users place cash or crypto wagers on just about anything. For example, as of this writing, Polymarket’s trending tab included Time’s 2025 person of the year, a bunch of different sports matches, Netflix’s proposed acquisition of WB, Elon Musk’s tweets, Trump’s release of the Epstein files, and most grimly of all, whether or not the US will sink another oil ship associated with Venezuela.
Polymarket – which was banned in the US back in 2022 after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found it was offering betting contracts without the agency’s approval, only for the agency to drop its investigation this year and give the site a regulatory thumbs up – even allowed users to bet on whether it would go live in the US this year. Odds prior to its rollout this month were at 99 percent, according to Fortune. Kalshi, meanwhile, has managed to circumvent states’ laws against sports betting due to its financial market status, though Nevada recently closed that loophole, and Massachusetts may soon follow suit.
While obvious offshoots of the sports gambling craze that has swept the nation in recent years – promising impoverished citizens a last-ditch means of getting out of debt while actually just miring them in more – Polymarket and Kalshi have recognized that their fortunes are tied to news. The two have approached this in different ways. Kalshi recently struck deals with both CNN and CNBC to integrate its prediction data across the networks’ programming. In a press release, Kalshi cited the fact that it "recently called the NYC Mayoral election eight minutes after polls closed, hours before the media" as evidence that this is good for news and society, actually, and not yet another rotten seed that will eventually sprout an ill-gotten money tree. Also, the system is easily gamed, as Slate recently pointed out:
If a Republican political firm wanted to buy $50,000 in contracts on the GOP to win the House, that purchase alone could move the price — and thus the implied odds — significantly. If a Republican political consultant wanted to buy $100,000 worth of contracts on the GOP to hold the House, they could materially move the price and thus the implied odds. With CNN providing free media coverage of the party’s improving chances, wouldn’t that be a compelling alternative to simply buying some commercial time? Are you starting to see the problem with a major news channel using an opaque tool of financial speculation to sum up conventional wisdom about an election?
Polymarket, on the other hand, has favored a more digital-first approach, striking a deal with Twitter to become the platform’s official prediction partner and going all-in on news aggregation with both its official account (which has over 800,000 followers) and offshoots, including NewsWire US, a separate aggregator it recently purchased. Both Polymarket and Kalshi have also partnered with various influencers, some laughably disreputable.
All this in mind, you will not be surprised to learn that Polymarket and Kalshi both have pages for multiple video game award shows, most prominent among them last weekend’s Streamer Awards and today’s Game Awards. Gamers represent an especially tantalizing prospect for gambling companies, with gacha mechanics and casino-funded streamers getting them started early so they can eventually graduate into full-blown betting.
Polymarket’s Streamer Awards streamer of the year category commanded a total trading volume of $24,169 – an impressive sum until you consider The Game Awards’ game of the year category, on which users have wagered nearly $40 million. Kalshi users, meanwhile, have wagered $218,771 and $3 million, respectively, on the same award categories. Both sites feature additional pages for other award categories, as well as things hosts might say.
When The Streamer Awards’ host, popular Twitch streamer QTCinderella, caught wind of her event’s Polymarket pages, she was furious.
“I would like to make this very clear: I am in no way associated with that website, and I am in no way condoning that website,” she said during a stream earlier this month in response to a viewer who accused her of supposed “insider trading.” “I have no association with them. I do not. In fact, my lawyers are talking to their lawyers because I am not happy about that.”
She added that her IP was being used without her consent and that her lawyers sent the site a cease and desist letter. As of this writing, however, Polymarket’s Streamer Awards pages remain accessible – as do Kalshi’s – even though the event has since concluded.
Aftermath reached out to QTCinderella and Polymarket for more information but did not receive a reply.
The Game Awards’ stance on prediction markets is unclear. Aftermath reached out to the organization to ask if Polymarket and/or Kalshi have received Geoff Keighley’s world exclusive seal of approval, but did not receive a reply.
Kalshi does not even consider The Game Awards to be that big of a deal, in the grand scheme of things.
“That is a… decent number,” Kalshi rep Jack Such told Polygon about The Game Awards’ market. “It’s OK. But some markets have hundreds of millions.”
While Such claimed that individual pages are tended to by a dedicated market team because “every market you see on Kalshi requires a pretty extensive legal contract,” it’s hard to imagine that any specific page registers as more than a temporary blip on Kalshi or Polymarket’s radar. After all, they make their money in aggregate. That’s why it behooves both companies to, as Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour recently said, “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
Somehow, what that actually entails is even more sinister than it sounds.
"It's part of a larger trend in Silicon Valley to insert themselves into the cracks of modern society,” Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day said in a recent video. “Everything that's bad about the world, they don't want to fix it. What they want to do is figure out a way to become a middle man in that system to offer a crappier version of what we already used to do."
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Luke Plunkett
