On June 3, almost 20 million people tuned into Game 1 of the NBA Finals and watched the New York Knicks defeat the San Antonio Spurs 105-95. But what most people might remember best from the Knicks’ historic championship run didn’t take place inside Madison
Square Garden. It happened on the street just outside, when 23-year-old fan MD Ahnaf Hossain grabbed a street interviewer’s green microphone and yelled, “My mayor Muslim/My bagels Jewish/My Christian Dior/Knicks in four!”
The clip was an instant hit, reposted and reacted to and viewed and scraped so many times in addition to its original 7 million views on TikTok that its final reach is almost impossible to calculate. The chant turned into a rallying cry for the Knicks’ victory; it was printed on shirts, sewn onto jackets, even remarked on by the aforementioned Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
Hossain’s viral catchphrase wasn’t planned. But the green microphone he grabbed was. The clip was recorded, edited, and promoted by Kalshi, one of the leading prediction-market platforms available today.
In five years since they launched, prediction-market platforms — primarily Kalshi and its main competitor, Polymarket — have evolved from untested newcomers to consequential players in the multilayered world of financial markets. They allow users to place bets on everything from specific words mentioned in a White House press briefing to the highest-recorded temperature of a heat wave in Paris. At the same time that these platforms are rapidly scaling, they’re also weathering intense criticism from financial experts, regulatory leaders, and gambling-addiction advocates. But the teams behind Kalshi and Polymarket aren’t just courting users with regular advertisements. They’re purchasing their way onto the internet’s front page — drawing an invisible psychological line between themselves and the biggest names and events in culture, while presenting themselves as a cultural authority free from political spin or media bias. And if the goal is to turn prediction markets into an omnipresent inevitability, it seems like it’s working.
“Kalshi is all over the World Cup, banner ads on the field. You see rather clever advertising for all of [these platforms] throughout streaming and linear TV,” Northeastern University communications technology professor John Wihbey tells Rolling Stone. “They’re absolutely ubiquitous.”
How it works
Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket operate on one main argument: Prediction markets are not gambling. Exchanges on these platforms work on a peer-to-peer level, with users selecting a “yes” or “no” position. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the upcoming Best Picture Winner, the next James Bond, or the 2028 Democratic nominee for President. If you think Congressional salaries will increase, and say yes, you’ve made a trade.
Polymarket is crypto-native — you can only wager cryptocurrency — while Kalshi operates with the currency of whatever country you trade in. Because these wagers can only happen if another user is willing to take a position, there is technically no house involved. According to a Kalshi spokesperson, this means that the platform is not incentivized like a casino to force losses, which makes trading on Kalshi a “true financial exchange.” Prediction-market platforms have gotten so big that even traditional online trading sites like Robinhood and DraftKings and social media giants like Meta are attempting to create direct competitors. Just recently, sports-only newcomer Novig payed Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney to promote their prediction market platform by
In June 2026, Kalshi and Polymarket each had one of their biggest months to date, marking over $45 billion in trading volume. (Kalshi declined to comment on its marketing budget. Polymarket did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.) But there’s clear evidence that prediction market platforms are fighting for brand awareness in cultural moments.
This not only includes obtrusive social media collaborations but high-profile celebrity endorsements, partnership deals with sports leagues and organizations, and viral tactics employed by the biggest names online. During the 2026 World Cup, FIFA made Kalshi an official partner in the middle of the tournament, as ads starring Academy Award nominee Timothée Chalamet and NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo played across TV and phone screens alike. It’s a precedent that continued with the US Open — Kalshi was named the official partner of the tennis tournament hours after it started.
There’s no evidence that “My mayor Muslim,” which might be Kalshi’s biggest marketing success to date, was a staged recording. Hossain was a normal fan outside celebrating a major event in New York. But the clip’s success wouldn’t have been possible without Kalshi’s existing marketing ecosystem. Street interviewers working for Kalshi were outside MSG for the express purpose of capturing viral fan celebrations. The spread of the video was aided by clippers, accounts that post hundreds of clips in a single day and are paid by companies to stealthily link these viral moments to their platforms. (Many of these accounts do not make clear that the clips are paid advertisements outright, either forgoing disclosures altogether or linking to Kalshi or Polymarket in follow-up posts.) And in a follow-up interview, also created by the Kalshi team, Hossain said he only approached the microphone outside MSG because he recognized Kalshi’s “iconic” green color. If a key goal of advertising is to target the widest possible audience, our increasingly popular social networks mean that some of the biggest ads don’t have to be paid.
Expert Warnings
Every company wants to make money — Kalshi and Polymarket are no different. But it’s not a coincidence that prediction-market platforms are creating inescapable cultural footprints online at the same time that legal and financial experts are challenging their right to exist. Kalshi and Polymarket’s biggest selling point is that niche expertise can be rewarded with cash. (“On Kalshi, everyone is an expert at something,” a spokesperson tells Rolling Stone.)
This idea is also the source of some of the companies’ strongest criticism. Wihbey notes that some of the most popular trades on prediction-market platforms have “single points of failure” that can be easily manipulated or left vulnerable to insider trading, like “betting that a key player is not going to play because of injury.” In April 2026, a former Army soldier was chargedwith using classified information around the U.S. capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to win around $400,000 on Polymarket. Kalshi also suspended three political candidates in Minnesota, Texas, and Virigina who allegedly attempted to trade on their own campaigns, a trend the platform says has continued. In early July, Spotify suspended the stream count for Malcom Todd’s song “Earrings” after a rapid and unexpected rise in the U.S. charts coincided with what Spotify called “suspicious” trades on Kalshi. And French authorities are still investigatinga Polymarket user suspected of tampering with a weather gauge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, resulting in a win of $21,398. Just last week, former Representative George Santos became the first person banned from Kalshi for betting on whether or not he himself would attend Trump’s 2026 State of the Union speech.
Kalshi and Polymarket have both established policies prohibiting insider trading. In fact, Kalshi believes that with over 30 percent of its workforce focused on catching insider trading, its spokesperson tells Rolling Stone it “goes further” than the stock market in investigating fraud. But what’s infinitely harder to catch is one-off fraud, especially from people who aren’t publicly linked to their source of information. “There are all kinds of betting opportunities that invite people with privileged knowledge to skew the odds or try to make a quick buck,” Wihbey adds. “You can try to police it, but it’s going to be effectively impossible at scale.”
An Ongoing Legal Battle
While new users are continuing to flock to the platforms, there’s an ongoing battle between federal regulators and state officials on whose responsibility it is to keep prediction-market platforms in check.
With traditional casinos, both in-person and online, the house sets the odds. These are regulated by state gambling commissioners and subject to the state-level laws around advertisements and consumer protections, explains former SEC commissioner Joseph Grundfest. Kalshi and Polymarket, however, claim their platforms don’t facilitate typical wagers — they are swaps, or financial contracts, which means they are currently regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an independent federal financial agency. Twenty states have ongoing legal challenges against the platforms, claiming they are gambling sites using purposefully obtuse language and should be subject to state laws.
According to Grundfest, the popularity of prediction-market platforms has complicated the debate over what, exactly, makes a swap different from a bet. The arguments continue, but it’s Grundfest’s belief that Kalshi and the CFTC have a long legal fight in front of them. “Swaps were commonly understood to mean transactions involving financial instruments, not whether the Cleveland Cavaliers were going to beat the L.A. Clippers,” he says.
Controlling the Scroll
Kalshi and Polymarket are growing fast — a trend that’s mirrored in their rapidly expanding markets. According to Wihbey, the early days of Kalshi and Polymarket were defined by a techno-optimist bent, with “rhetorical moves” about how the markets’ wagers could operate as polling data free of media bias or political spin. This has allowed the companies to exist as both places to make bets and platforms for news. Online, the official accounts of Kalshi and Polymarket act as aggregate news sources, posting hundreds of real-time updates on pop-culture events with language like “JUST IN” and “BREAKING,” which experts believe could make people more likely to use the platforms for wagers once they’ve already accepted them as reliable sources of information.
“Prediction markets sterilized some of those perceptions [around] gambling,” New York University marketing professor Jared Watson tells Rolling Stone. “You could find a healthy segment of Gen Z that would say they find more value in these prediction markets than they do in the stock exchange.”
This year, Polymarket and Kalshi also began actively seeking out mainstream entertainment events. Trading on the platforms skyrocketed around Season 34 of Dancing With the Stars. In 2026, the reality-TV series was nominated for an Emmy for the first time in 10 years after a spike in popularity attributed to an influx of viral social media clips around the show. After the July finale of Love Island U.S.A., Kalshi trades around the show hit $77.3 million — thanks to targeted ads mimicking many of the organic videos and edits Love Island fans were already making. “We’ve seen a lot of new users come in through these new cultural markets,” the Kalshi spokesperson tells Rolling Stone. “We think [it’s] important that when [people] think of Kalshi, they associate Kalshi with being part of culture.”
Prediction-market platforms’ foray into cultural events and moments that involve live voting create even more complicated questions about legal liability. Are audiences influenced by the marketplace to vote one way or the other? Many of these events, like key moments on Love Island, The Bachelor, or DWTS, can also be influenced by one actor — like a swap on whether a beloved pro on DWTS might sit out an episode or take a break all together.
But what’s increasingly apparent is how Kalshi and Polymarket’s place in culture is allowing the platforms to mold both their cultural image and public perception around gambling, one trade at a time. Both platforms encourage trading on events of varying seriousness; mashing national concerns with personal frivolities until opening an app and betting about the winners of a reality television series or the timing of a military strike feel equally reasonable.
By connecting themselves to the biggest names and events in culture, prediction-market platforms are cementing a place in history that future regulation will be hard-pressed to change. They’re in the photos. They’re in the winners’ circles. They’re on your timelines and for-you pages and shopping ads and group chats and memes and on the lips of your favorite celebrities. It’s all with one aim in mind: converting passive viewers into active users. And for a financial market that’s sparked a firestorm of concerns, the winning argument for prediction-market platforms is deceptively simple: You’ve seen us everywhere. Why not take the bet?
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