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Hello fintech friends,
TWIF friend Petrit wrote up a great State of Prediction Markets report this week, with some surprising insights.
Prediction markets traded $111B in notional volume in Q2 2026 — up 1,764% year-over-year and more than all of 2024 and 2025 combined…. June alone did $52.7B, the largest month on record. The sector also pulled in $1.3B in venture funding last quarter.
Kalshi and Polymarket control ~91% of volume (63% and 28% respectively), with Kalshi now the larger of the two by notional volume ($65.9B vs. $26.7B in Q2).
Is it predicting? Or sports betting? Sports predictions dominate markets (86% of Kalshi's volume, 56% of Polymarket's), though Polymarket is more diversified across crypto, politics, and culture.
And 125 platforms now exist across 12 different market mechanisms; up from just 15 in 2020.
Both Polymarket and Kalshi are converging on the same features: combo/parlay bets (30%+ of Kalshi's Q2 volume), perpetual futures, and stablecoins.
Hyperliquid launched onchain prediction markets in May, though it's captured just 0.3% market-share so far. Meta is reportedly building a standalone prediction-markets app, Robinhood launched its own exchange, and Coinbase's prediction-market revenue doubled to over $100M annualized.
Check out the full report for more. (Not a partner promotion, I just found it interesting.)
Read on for the biggest news stories from this week below.
- Nik
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The Rundown
🏦 Financial Services & Banking
Western Union launched Stablecard, a USDPT-backed Visa card built with Rain. The card lets users hold and spend dollars in 37 markets, with 60+ targeted by year-end.
Wells Fargo announced it will roll out tokenized deposits for corporate and commercial treasury clients this fall, starting with a USD-to-GBP corridor and expanding through 2027 as part of a shared network with JPMorgan.
Mastercard and the National Bank of Egypt launched Egypt's first USD-denominated corporate debit card, giving Egyptian businesses a direct tool for cross-border payments to international suppliers.
Capital One said it closed more than 300 Trump Organization-linked accounts in 2021 due to anti-money-laundering concerns, pushing back on the Trump Organization's political-discrimination lawsuit.
🚀 Product Launches
Liner launched Liner Finance, an AI research agent that turns public filings, market data, and news into structured company reports refreshed every 20 minutes for retail investors.
Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay to give AI agents an identity and the ability to hold stablecoins and make purchases within spending caps set by their owners.
Coinbase expanded its "Everything Exchange" to the UK, letting users trade US stocks and crypto.
Zerohash expanded its stablecoin infrastructure to support BlackRock's new tokenized money market fund (BRSRV).
KuCoin rolled out a stablecoin gift card letting businesses distribute USDT and USDC globally for customer rewards, promotions, and incentives.
The SOLO Network announced a bank reliance pilot, coordinated with Treasury, FinCEN, the OCC, and the FDIC to make customer identity verification reusable across banks and fintechs.
Circle unveiled its founding validator cohort for the Arc blockchain (including BlackRock, DTCC, Mastercard, and Visa) ahead of a September 16 public mainnet launch.
💸 Other News
Monzo became the first British digital bank to top one million business customers, with one in six UK businesses now banking with it, including one in five newly formed firms.
Dakota applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust bank charter, aiming to become a federally regulated provider of digital asset custody and stablecoin issuance.
Robinhood received regulatory permission from the UK's Financial Conduct Authority to begin offering cryptocurrency services.
Google rolled out "Ask Google Pay," a Gemini-powered conversational tool in India that lets users query their spending.
Revolut teamed up with OpenAI to give retail customers up to 12 months of free ChatGPT Go access.
🤝 Partnership Corner
Sierra and Plaid (our parent) partnered to let AI customer-service agents securely connect to a user's bank account mid-conversation.
Navy Federal Investment Services selected Apex Fintech Solutions to power its new Digital Investor platform.
Dinari partnered with Circle to put the entire S&P 500 on the blockchain, letting U.S. investors buy and sell tokenized stocks through self-custody wallets funded with USDC.
Klarna went live with J.P. Morgan Payments.
😞 The Bad News
Neobank Chime is cutting about 10% of its workforce, roughly 140 jobs, as CEO Chris Britt cited AI-driven efficiencies and a push toward flatter, smaller teams.
New York sued prediction markets provider Kalshi, seeking an injunction to shut down the prediction-market platform and $36 billion in penalties, alleging it offers illegal, unregulated sports betting.
South African crypto exchange Luno announced it will cut 20% of its global staff as part of a restructuring around automation investments.
