Meet our sponsors, a $8.5M community win, and 5 stories moving the market

This week's edition is brought to you by ROLR

Intelligence for prediction markets. This week: our conference sponsors, last call for speakers and sponsors, a guest perspective from SENSE, a community win worth celebrating, and the five stories moving the market.

Prediction Markets Conference 2026 lands at MEET Las Vegas, November 3–5 — three days built around institutional adoption, regulation and integrity, AI and infrastructure, and the traders and desks actually moving these markets. The room is being built by the companies defining this category:

ROLR — Presenting / Diamond. The newest regulated U.S. prediction-markets platform, launching via an exclusive partnership with Crypto.com. rolr.com

SafeBets — Diamond. A no-risk prediction platform where users forecast crypto, equities, commodities and currency markets to earn rewards. safebets.world

GRID Esports — Gold. The official game-data platform for Riot Games, Ubisoft and KRAFTON, powering integrity and live markets. grid.gg

Connamara Technologies — Gold. Builder of EP3, named Best Matching Engine for Prediction/Event Markets 2026. connamara.tech

Predyx — Gold. A Bitcoin-native prediction market on the Lightning Network. predyx.com

DoubleZero — Gold. Wall-Street-grade data speed for Solana and on-chain markets. doublezero.xyz

SENSE — Gold. Advertising intelligence and omnichannel growth for prediction-market operators. sensedigitalmarketing.com

The November roster is nearly locked, with 70+ speaker applications already in. A small number of speaking slots and sponsorships remain, and we are closing them shortly. If you are an operator, founder, builder, trader, investor, or policy voice with something to say about where this category goes next, now is the time.

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Written by SENSE — why prediction-market growth strategies should be built around the moments that change what people believe happens next.

Election marketing has traditionally been organized around a calendar. Campaigns launch. Primaries happen. Conventions arrive. Advertising intensifies. Election Day approaches. For prediction markets, that model misses something fundamental. An election is not one sustained period of attention. It is a sequence of moments that continuously change what people believe will happen next. A debate changes expectations. A new poll changes expectations. A candidate announcement changes expectations. An unexpected news event can change expectations in minutes. And every time expectations change, people have a reason to look again.

For prediction markets, the opportunity surrounding the 2026 election cycle is not simply to acquire as many politically interested users as possible before November. It is to understand when attention becomes uncertainty, when uncertainty becomes curiosity, and when curiosity creates a reason to participate. That requires a different growth model.

Political attention doesn't move in a straight line. Political interest may be persistent; political attention is not. Attention accelerates around events that provide new information, and the 2024 presidential election demonstrated this unusually clearly. Recent transaction-level research examined prediction-market activity around three major political events: the Biden-Trump debate, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and Joe Biden's withdrawal from the race. Trading activity increased following all three, though participants responded differently depending on the information each introduced; Biden's withdrawal generated the heaviest trading. The lesson isn't simply that major events move prices. It's that new information creates a reason to reconsider what happens next. A story breaks, people consume it, and they ask: Does this change the race? Will this person become the nominee? Will control of Congress change? Those are inherently predictive questions, and prediction markets sit directly at the intersection of news consumption and opinion formation. That creates a powerful sequence: Attention leads to Uncertainty leads to Participation.

2024 showed what happens when the story changes. After the June 2024 debate, the conversation shifted almost overnight from a conventional Biden-versus-Trump race to a more fundamental question: would Biden remain the nominee? Even as he publicly maintained he would stay in, market participants kept assigning meaningful probability to his withdrawal. The interesting lesson isn't whether a particular market was right; it's that the information environment changed, and people returned to markets to understand what that change meant.

Don't buy the election evenly. Instead of asking "how much should we spend during the election?", prediction-market companies should ask "which moments deserve disproportionate investment?" Known moments can be anticipated; reactive moments can't be placed neatly on a calendar, but they create exactly the uncertainty that makes prediction markets relevant. That suggests a simple operating model: Anticipate, Activate, Extend.

Build between moments. Surge around them. Always-on media builds familiarity before those moments through connected television, premium video and news environments. Then, when the story moves, the job shifts from building familiarity to capturing active curiosity. Context matters as much as timing: connect Audience x Context x Moment.

Don't just target voters. Prediction markets are not political campaigns. Consider market mindsets: people who consume information frequently, seek new information, revise opinions as circumstances change, and are comfortable thinking probabilistically. What connects them is one question: "What do I think happens next?"

The first trade is only the beginning. Prediction markets can connect moment-based acquisition with lifetime-value optimization, using post-acquisition signals to reveal who becomes valuable. The question evolves from "who converted?" to "who became valuable?" and ultimately "how do we acquire more people like them?" That creates another cycle: Acquire, Learn, Optimize, Acquire smarter.

SENSE Perspective: Prediction markets sit at a unique intersection of media, information and probability, which requires a different approach to growth than conventional political advertising. Don't advertise around the election. Own the moments that move the market.

SENSE is a data and audience-intelligence partner to prediction-market operators. sensedigitalmarketing.com

One of the best parts of building this conference is watching the people who pass through it win. Since our April edition in Las Vegas, where River Markets co-founder Oscar Levy joined us on stage, the team has closed an $8.5 million raise. In the roundtable below, the River Markets founders sit down with fellow builders to talk prediction-market hedge funds, liquidity, and where the category goes next. Congratulations to the whole team — this is exactly the kind of momentum the November stage is built to create.

Watch the roundtable →Revisit Oscar Levy's session from our April edition:

Watch the session →

Kalshi is seeking fresh capital at roughly a $40 billion valuation, nearly double the $22 billion it carried in its prior round. Polymarket is reportedly raising about $1 billion at a $21 billion valuation, more than double the $9 billion it held last October, with Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the NYSE) among the backers after already committing more than $2 billion. When the operator of the NYSE keeps doubling down and both leaders chase $20B-plus marks in the same quarter, the category has stopped being a curiosity. It's infrastructure.

Combined weekly contract volume across Kalshi and Polymarket Global hit $12.88 billion in the first week of September, up 14.2% week over week, with Kalshi setting a multi-week high of $11.86 billion. DeFi Rate estimates Kalshi's NFL volume could reach roughly $56.5 billion this season under a conservative baseline — nearly eight times last season's $7.21 billion — and as high as $128 billion if the preseason pace holds.

Cantor Fitzgerald has launched institutional block trading in event contracts on Kalshi, with Susquehanna providing institutional-scale liquidity. Cantor plans to open the door to roughly 3,000 institutional clients, and CNBC reports hedge funds are about to enter in a big way. Event contracts are turning from a retail app into a portfolio tool — the exact shift we are building the November stage around.

On August 28 the Ninth Circuit ruled 3-0 against Kalshi, deepening a circuit split over whether the Commodity Exchange Act preempts state gaming law. Earlier in the month a Washington state court ordered Kalshi to stop offering sports, elections and other "mentions" contracts in the state. The CFTC has now sued Arizona, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York and Connecticut, even as 44 state attorneys general maintain the CFTC has no authority over sports event contracts.

Heading into the September 15–16 FOMC meeting, Kalshi was pricing roughly a 58% chance of a quarter-point move and Polymarket about 56%, up sharply from around 26% just two weeks earlier. Event markets are increasingly the real-time read on macro expectations, updating faster than surveys and often ahead of the commentary.

See you in Vegas, November 3–5.

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