The 2025 prediction market has come to a successful close, delivering an impressive performance. Institutional and retail investors' enthusiasm for event-based predictions has reached an unprecedented high, with mainstream platforms like Kalshi and Opinion Labs setting new records in spot trading volume in December, reaching $18.8 billion in a single month.

According to Artemis data tracking, this growth is not a fleeting phenomenon — the annual trading volume has steadily increased, rising from less than $1 billion in January to a historic high in December. This reflects that prediction markets are gradually evolving into mainstream financial tools, used for hedging risks, tracking elections and economic data, and even monitoring trends in popular culture.

In platform rankings, Kalshi and Opinion Labs each secured $6.7 billion, accounting for about 36% of the total share, forming a duopoly; Polymarket follows closely with $5.3 billion, Limitless contributed $672 million, and Myriad is at the scale of $13.8 million.

More notably, Kalshi, a US-regulated centralized platform, surpassed last year's leader Polymarket in weekly trading volume by the end of the year. As of the week ending December 21, Kalshi's weekly trading volume reached $2.3 billion, nearly double that of its competitor.

This shift indicates that the prediction market ecosystem is accelerating its differentiation and maturation. Research institutions predict that the total annual trading volume of the prediction market could break through $40 billion in 2026, moving towards a trillion-dollar scale within ten years. The transformation from a niche hedging tool to a mainstream financial infrastructure is no longer a fantasy.