Kalshi logs $800m in March Madness trades
Table of contents
- Kalshi recorded $800m in traded volume across the opening weekend of the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments, per company data cited by Bloomberg.
- That figure nearly doubles Kalshi’s total volume across the entire 2025 tournament, which reached approximately $450m.
- The NCAA has urged the CFTC to suspend college sports event contracts, citing integrity and student-athlete safety concerns.
Prediction market platform Kalshi has turned March Madness into its most active category, processing $800m in traded volume over the tournament’s opening weekend, as first reported by Bloomberg.
March Madness is the annual NCAA college basketball championship, played across three weeks each March and involving 68 teams in a single-elimination bracket. It is one of the most widely wagered-on sporting events in the United States, drawing tens of millions of participants.
The American Gaming Association projected total legal wagers on the 2026 tournament through traditional regulated sportsbooks at $3.3bn, a figure that covers only licensed betting operators and does not include prediction market volume.
For prediction markets, March Madness has become the clearest commercial test yet of how quickly these platforms can scale volume alongside established operators.
Record volume in context
According to company data cited by Bloomberg, Kalshi users traded more than $800m in contracts tied to the men’s and women’s tournament games across the opening weekend. That figure nearly doubles the approximately $450m traded across the full three-week span of last year’s tournaments, with just $208m recorded in the first two rounds of the 2025 event alone.
The platform processed more than 2.5 million trades over the opening weekend, maintaining system uptime of 99.98%. 19 March was the second biggest single day in Kalshi’s history, behind only the Super Bowl.
Over the first two rounds, total volume reached $2.34bn, generating $25.5m in fees, more than Kalshi earned during the first five months of 2025. Sports made up 90% of volume on all four days of the tournament, with college basketball accounting for more than half of first-round activity.
Billion-dollar bracket
Ahead of the tournament, Kalshi launched its Billion Dollar Bracket, offering a top prize of $1bn to any participant who correctly predicts all 63 game outcomes. No verified perfect bracket has ever been publicly recorded. If no perfect entry is submitted, the top-scoring participant receives $1m, with two education non-profits each receiving $500,000.
Platforms have been careful around trademark usage. Kalshi markets the contest using “March matchups” rather than the NCAA’s registered term March Madness. The NCAA has made clear it will defend its intellectual property and warned platforms against implying official affiliation.
NCAA president Charlie Baker wrote to the CFTC the week before the tournament, requesting a temporary suspension of trading on college sports event contracts. An NCAA spokesperson said:
“Sport integrity is paramount for the NCAA, and despite the recent CFTC memo, we remain deeply concerned by unprotected prediction markets that pose a threat to competition integrity and student-athlete safety.”
Legal battles mount
The record trading figures arrive against a backdrop of escalating legal conflict across multiple states.
A Nevada court forced Kalshi to temporarily shut down in the state in a landmark ruling, with the Ninth Circuit denying Kalshi’s emergency motion to halt enforcement pending appeal. A hearing is scheduled for 16 April and no final ruling has been issued.
Separately, Arizona became the first US state to file criminal charges against Kalshi over its sports event contracts, to which Kalshi responded by filing a federal lawsuit against Arizona.
The company has also filed a preemptive suit against Utah, arguing its CFTC-regulated exchange cannot be subjected to state gambling statutes. All three cases remain ongoing with no final rulings.
The core legal dispute across all these cases is identical: state regulators argue prediction platforms offer gambling products subject to local gaming law, while Kalshi contends its CFTC designation as a contract market means federal derivatives law takes precedence.
A bipartisan Senate bill targeting prediction markets was also introduced in March, adding legislative pressure to an already contested regulatory picture.
Beyond the US, Kalshi has been expanding internationally, having launched prediction markets in Brazil through a partnership with XP, its first non-US market.
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