Kalshi Download Metrics Soar With Start Of Football Season
Prediction markets roundup: Is Robinhood getting expanded NFL betting options?; Kalshi launches ecosystem hub with Solana and Base.
Kalshi is seeing more people download its app in the first couple of weeks of football season.
The prediction market platform has seen more than 100,000 downloads over the past month, according to public data from Sensor Tower. Kalshi’s download ranking among free finance apps on the App Store started spiking around the start of the NFL season, on Sept. 4, when the Philadelphia Eagles opened the season with a victory over the Dallas Cowboys.
Kalshi has seen its ranking climb as high as No. 10 this past weekend.
At times it has even outpaced its partner for prediction markets, Robinhood, which has seen a smaller but similar bump in recent weeks.
The download numbers for Kalshi are slightly ahead of what Sensor Tower tracks for all sportsbooks other than FanDuel and DraftKings, the two biggest apps in the state-regulated sports betting space. Kalshi, of course, is in a much different stage of its life cycle and serves all 50 states.
PayNearMe has developed the gaming industry’s first platform that is purpose-built to dramatically improve the end-to-end payment experience. It enables operators to manage the entire payment journey, for all major forms of payment and through the most popular channels. With PayNearMe, operators gain full control of the payment flow, promoting acquisition, retention and efficiency. One platform, one integration—built to solve gaming’s toughest payments problems.
Prediction markets roundup
Robinhood getting more NFL betting?: Kalshi posted this on its Discord:
“Kalshi is continuing to integrate some of our popular contracts with brokers! Starting on Wednesday (September 18, 2025) at 3 am ET, there will be some changes to fees. Maker fees will now be applied to the events in the following series: KXNFLSPREAD, KXNFLTOTAL, KXNFLANYTD, KXNFLFIRSTTD, KXNFL2TD, KXNASCAR, KXPGARYDER, KXNASCARRACE, KXUCL, KXUCLGAME, KXPFAPOY, and KXBALLONDOR. These fees are currently necessary to ensure we can offer these markets on brokerages. If you do not use limit orders on Kalshi, these fees will not impact you.”
Changes like this generally mean the markets are going to be offered on Robinhood. That means the financial platform could potentially allow point spread betting, betting on points scored in an NFL game, and touchdown prop bets. None of the football markets appear on Robinhood as of Thursday afternoon, beyond moneyline betting.
Spread and total betting have been pretty small at Kalshi to date. Putting it on Robinhood would increase the amount of trading on these markets a great deal.
Kalshi debuts ecosystem hub with Solana and Base (Blockworks): “Kalshi, the US-regulated prediction market exchange, rolled out a new program on Wednesday called KalshiEco Hub. The initiative, developed in partnership with Solana and Coinbase-backed Base, is designed to attract builders, traders, and content creators to a growing ecosystem around prediction markets. By combining its regulatory footing with crypto-native infrastructure, Kalshi said it is aiming to become a bridge between traditional finance and onchain innovation. The hub offers grants, technical assistance, and marketing support to selected projects. Kalshi also announced that it will support native deposits of Solana’s SOL token and USDC stablecoin, making it easier for users already active in crypto to participate directly.”
Early collaborators include Kalshinomics, a dashboard for market analytics, and Verso, which is building professional-grade tools for market discovery and execution. Other partners, such as Caddy, are exploring ways to expand retail-facing trading experiences.
Will gaming industry kill or embrace prediction markets they say mimic sports betting? (Nevada Independent): “Analysts noted that prediction markets aren’t taking away a significant portion of sports bets. Jefferies gaming analyst David Katz wrote in a Sept. 3 report that prediction markets are seeing 7 percent of what is legally wagered in sportsbooks. …”
“Currently, we do not view betting exchanges as a competitive threat to profitability for existing [sportsbook] operators,” Citizens Bank gaming analyst Jordan Bender wrote in a research note Monday.”
Quintenz/CFTC update, or lack thereof: The nominee to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brian Quintenz, caused a stir and a lot of headlines a week ago when he released some private messages with the Winklevoss twins. It seemed clear that move by Quintenz was meant to do something, or anything, to get his confirmation moving again. While votes had been planned in the Senate Agriculture Committee over the summer, they never happened, and Quintenz has been in limbo for almost two months. But despite the hubbub Quintenz caused, nothing has happened; we’re at the same place we were a week ago. There are no scheduled meetings of the Ag Committee, and there’s no sense of if or when Quintenz’s confirmation might move forward.