📊 The $1 Billion Super Bowl

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Here’s what we got for you today:

• 🏈 Prediction markets went all-in on the Super Bowl

• 🔥 Former NBA MVP signs with Kalshi

• 😴 Kalshi partners with Sleeper to bring prediction markets to 10 million fantasy sports fans

• 📈 Market Moves

• 📊 Odds & Ends

Kalshi and Polymarket turned Super Bowl LX into the most aggressive marketing weekend prediction markets have seen so far. Kalshi hired skywriting planes to spell its name in the clouds above the Big Game, wrapped cars in Kalshi green and offered free rides to the game, and ran shuttle buses from Union Square to the stadium. Polymarket countered with "Portal," a pair of physical installations in Boston (166 Canal St) and Seattle (589 Occidental Ave S) running Feb 6-8, featuring live-streamed split-screen video feeds of fans in each city alongside real-time Super Bowl odds.

And then there's the part that made everyone do a double take: Polymarket's halftime performer markets. One anonymous trader racked up over $15,600 in profit across 17 positions betting on who would and wouldn't appear during the halftime show. The account nailed nearly every call except two small No bets on Rauw Alejandro and Karol G. The rest of the portfolio was green. With $60,000+ in total position value across halftime markets alone, it was either the best-researched Super Bowl bet sheet anyone's ever seen or a reminder that event markets with material non-public information are still the wild west.

The volume numbers back up the marketing spending. Kalshi reported more than $400 million in trading volume on its pro football champion market as of halftime alone. Polymarket's Super Bowl event markets approached $700 million in total volume. Those are figures that would've been unthinkable two years ago, when both platforms were still fighting regulators for the right to list sports contracts at all.

The marketing playbook here looks a lot more like DraftKings and FanDuel circa 2015 than anything from the fintech world. Free rides, branded vehicles, physical pop-ups in rival fan cities. This is customer acquisition warfare borrowed straight from daily fantasy's early days, when those two companies spent themselves into near-oblivion to grab market share. The difference is that Kalshi and Polymarket aren't competing just with each other. They're competing with the sportsbooks for the same eyeballs, trying to convince bettors that event contracts are a better product than a traditional point spread.

Polymarket's Portal installation was the more interesting play. Putting live cameras on fans in Boston and Seattle, with odds ticking in real time between them, turns the product into a spectacle. The streams went viral on X before the game even started. Kalshi's skywriting was louder but more transient; Polymarket built something people wanted to share.

I'd keep an eye on what these companies spend next. Combined Super Bowl volume clearing $1 billion across two platforms means the unit economics on aggressive consumer marketing are starting to pencil out. If Kalshi is chartering planes and Polymarket is building physical installations for a single weekend, the budgets for March Madness and the NBA playoffs are going to be similar sizes. The sportsbook incumbents spent a decade and billions of dollars normalizing real-money wagering on live events, and now prediction markets are drafting behind that cultural shift with a product that doesn't require a gaming license in most states. That's the real competitive advantage these marketing blitzes are designed to exploit.

KALSHI SIGNS FORMER NBA MVP GIANNIS ANTETOKOUNMPO🔥

Giannis Antetokounmpo signing a deal with Kalshi lands less like a sponsorship announcement and more like a cultural alignment, the kind of move that signals where attention, credibility, and curiosity have begun to settle at the edges of finance and public life.

The partnership frames prediction markets as a place where participation carries meaning beyond clicks and odds, drawing on Giannis’s reputation for discipline, patience, and long horizons to translate an abstract platform into something legible for a much wider audience.

For Kalshi, the deal communicates scale and confidence through association, linking a federally regulated market for future events with an athlete whose career has unfolded in public view and whose decisions tend to read as deliberate rather than impulsive.

The appeal works in both directions, since prediction markets trade on collective judgment and shared belief, concepts that mirror the way modern fandom already processes games, seasons, and narratives through probabilities, debates, and constant updates.

Giannis enters the picture as more than a face, positioning himself as someone choosing ownership and alignment, which reinforces the idea that these markets belong inside everyday conversation rather than living on the margins of finance or technology.

The timing matters as well, arriving during a period when prediction markets push toward institutional legitimacy while expanding cultural reach, using familiar figures to soften complexity and present participation as intuitive and socially fluent.

What emerges from the deal is a quiet statement about where influence flows, suggesting that the future of markets will be shaped as much by trust and recognition as by models and regulation, with figures like Giannis acting as bridges between abstract systems and the people invited to engage with them.

KALSHI'S SLEEPER AGENT 😴

Sleeper, the fantasy sports app with roughly 10 million users, launched real-money prediction markets powered by Kalshi on Thursday - timed to land ahead of the Super Bowl. Sports markets are live first, with Kalshi saying "additional real-world event markets" are coming soon.

The integration is the latest piece of what Kalshi is calling its "brokerage expansion" strategy: rather than fight for every new user itself, Kalshi is positioning its exchange as infrastructure that other apps plug into. Sleeper Markets LLC, a newly registered FCM and NFA member, routes customer orders to KalshiEX. Users go through full KYC onboarding and pay $0.02 per contract total - $0.01 to Sleeper Markets, $0.01 to Kalshi. It mirrors how traditional futures brokerage works.

"Sleeper has a highly engaged userbase," said Alex Cuoci, Kalshi's Chief of Staff, framing the deal as a template for future partnerships. Sleeper Head of Ops Eric Kim called it a "natural extension" of bringing prediction markets into where "millions of fans already come together around sports."

Kalshi claims annualized volume crossing $115 billion, with the pro football championship market alone projected to top $800 million. If even a fraction of Sleeper's 10 million users start trading, that's a real bump - especially since these are sports fans already engaged with fantasy and daily fantasy, the demographic most likely to trade event contracts.

On the same day Kalshi announced the Sleeper deal, a Massachusetts judge refused to stay an injunction that would force Kalshi to stop offering sports-event contracts in the state within 30 days unless it gets a gaming license. Sleeper's own risk disclosures warn that if sports contracts become restricted in a given state, it could trigger liquidation of open positions and block new ones. Bloomberg also notes Sleeper once sued the CFTC - a reminder that the regulatory path here hasn't been clean for anyone.

Building a consumer app is expensive and slow. Plugging into apps that already have the users is faster and capital-efficient, and Kalshi is leaning into it. The risk is that sports contracts - the exact product powering this distribution strategy - are the category drawing the most regulatory heat. If the Massachusetts template spreads and other states start requiring gaming licenses for sports-event contracts, Kalshi's new distribution partners could find themselves geofenced out of their biggest markets before the strategy has time to scale.

MARKET MOVES 📈

📈 Biggest swing: “Will Christopher Gotterup win the 2026 WM Phoenix Open?” moved 2% → 100% (Polymarket)

💰 Top earner: @kch123 - $1,564,583 24H Profit (Polymarket)

🤔 Weirdest market: “Clavicular sentenced to prison?” at 16% odds (Polymarket)

ODDS & ENDS 📊

• Kalshi allows users to trade using their Venmo balance.

• Polymarket files a trademark for “POLY” as they gear up for their rumored 2026 airdrop

• Lady Gaga Kalshi Market begs question of insider trading

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