Driven by Geopolitical and Sporting Events, Predictive Market Industry Open Interest Surpasses $1 Billion for the First Time

BlockBeats News, March 16th, OKX Ventures posted on social media that in February 2026, driven by geopolitics and sports events, the total trading volume of the prediction market industry reached $18.7 billion, and the open interest of unfilled contracts surpassed the $1 billion milestone for the first time in history.

The data shows that Polymarket's overall market share has risen from about 40% to 55%. The average daily trading volume of the U.S. political market reached $28.17 million, far exceeding sports ($1.32 million) and cryptocurrency markets ($44,000). Since inception, Polymarket has collected a total of $2.19 million in fees, with an average weekly revenue of $730,000.

The Polymarket platform has created a total of 295,000 markets, but only 505 "supermarkets" contributed 47% of the total historical trading volume; the top 10 most popular markets accounted for 57% of the total trading volume.

At the same time, 67.7% of markets have a lifespan of less than seven days, with 63% seeing zero trading volume within 24 hours of creation. Pricing reflects sentiment premiums: for example, in the "WTI Crude Oil to Reach $100 by Month End" market, Polymarket's pricing has consistently been 10 to 30 percentage points higher than the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) options’ implied probability, reflecting a greater impact from emotion-driven speculative capital.

The trading volume share of geopolitically related markets surged from about 3% to a peak of 14%, validating their value as a real-time financial intelligence system.

OKX Ventures expects that the prediction market may evolve along three trajectories: 1) achieve price convergence through quantitative fund arbitrage; 2) be pegged to or packaged into ETFs with real-world assets, generating asset synergy effects; 3) under regulatory influence, differentiate into compliant derivative channels and decentralized pricing centers.