Chances are, your family or friends have been yapping about prediction markets. And if you’re anything like me, you probably feel a bit overwhelmed. I had no idea what the space was all about until recently (and Reddit tells me I wasn’t alone), so let’s start with a primer before I dive into how two fascinating and incredibly fast-growing brands have approached lifecycle.
Full disclosure: I had never used either of these platforms, and whether or not you’re interested in the space itself, there’s a lot you can learn from companies that are growing like crazy, so I did the only reasonable thing I could think of. I downloaded and signed up for both, audited their onboarding process, and collected every message they sent after to try to understand how they capture the first deposit.
The TL;DR
Prediction markets are essentially a place where you can buy “yes” or “no” tickets on real-world events or cultural trends, like who wins a game or if interest rates will drop. Each ticket trades between $0.01 and $1.00, and if you’re right, it settles at $1; if you’re wrong, it goes to zero. If a contract is trading at 72 cents, the crowd is implicitly saying, “we think there’s a 72% chance this happens,” and that number moves in real time as new information arrives.
This market is growing like crazy (with some estimates saying the market could be worth $1 trillion by 2030.) And Polymarket and Kalshi have been at the forefront of this growing trend.
Kalshi is a U.S.-based prediction-market app designed to operate like a brokerage account. The company spent years obtaining CFTC approval to become the first regulated exchange for event contracts, so investors can use real dollars to hedge their existing portfolios.
Kalshi’s website
Polymarket is a crypto-native prediction-market app that is built to operate more like a social platform. It runs on stablecoins and the blockchain, grew up around viral news and cultural moments, and now has hundreds of thousands of active traders pushing billions in volume through quick, lightweight markets on whatever the internet is arguing about right now.
Polymarket’s website
The stats on these companies are pretty wild. As of early 2026, Kalshi has ~5.1M+ monthly active users and about $4.5B in monthly trading volume; and Polymarket has ~700k monthly active users and about $3.6B in monthly trading volume. As of 2026, Kalshi has a post-money valuation of $22B, and Polymarket has a valuation of ~$15B according to recent reports.
Honestly, the growth here is nuts, so I asked my friend Dio Favatas, a fintech growth vet (ex-J.P. Morgan, now leading MarTech and Identity at Capgemini), what he thinks is fueling it.
“Traditional financial institutions have been sitting on some of the richest behavioral data on the planet for decades, but most of them have the organizational DNA of a compliance-first enterprise, which means by the time a genuinely good idea works its way through legal, risk, product, and technology, the market has already moved, and some startup has already eaten their lunch. What Kalshi and Polymarket figured out, and what most fintechs still haven't fully committed to, is that the engagement loop has to be baked into the product architecture from day one rather than retrofitted on top of a system that was fundamentally designed to process transactions and not build relationships, and that's really what separates them from traditional players who have all the ingredients but not the organizational agility to put them together fast enough to matter.”
Breaking down the onboarding experience
On the surface, both of these apps serve the same purpose, but the companies themselves are actually quite different. If you look closely enough, you can start to pick up on this in the onboarding experiences. What’s really interesting is that both of them seem to have very different definitions for what they define as a successful activation.
A side-by-side comparison of Kalshi and Polymarket’s mobile onboarding flow.
Kalshi is built to operate like a brokerage, and the entire onboarding and signup flow is designed to reinforce this point and get a smaller set of people to move their money onto their CFTC-regulated exchange. From a lifecycle standpoint, it seems like a successful activation is any user who deposits real money into their Kalshi account.
Polymarket takes a completely different approach. The entire onboarding experience is designed to look more like a social app to drive major FOMO. They immediately drive this point home through the “invite-only” code entry point. For Polymarket, it seems a successful activation is the first trade. Given I received a free $10 to use on the app upon signup, I’d guess that this is a core metric/behavior the team is trying to drive. (Note: I was able to successfully spend/use this money without depositing any of my own money).
Basically, it seems Polymarket is betting that if you make one trade, you’ll probably be back for more.
Onboarding is your north star in disguise
The reason I’m highlighting this is that it’s one of the clearest examples I’ve seen of something I never really hear lifecycle teams talk about: business goals quietly determine every aspect of your lifecycle program.
Kalshi is focused on building trust, and Polymarket is focused on building habits. The difference is that trust is what makes someone choose you over a competitor, and habit is what trains users to open your app without thinking. The former is optimizing for assets under management, and the latter is optimizing for daily active users. In parts two and three, I’m going to break down exactly how those two seemingly small differences impact every part of the lifecycle program for Kalshi and Polymarket.
Come meet me at CRMC 2026
I’ll be at CRMC this year through June 1-3, so if you’re going to be there, shoot me a a DM in the app if you’re going to be there so we can meetup or just come stop by the Hightouch booth and say hello 👋.