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The loudest numbers in prediction markets this year have been about size. Kalshi was valued at roughly $20 billion in May and is reportedly raising at a $40 billion valuation, the category has cleared more than $100 billion in annualized trading volume, and a steady stream of venture capital has poured in behind the idea that Americans now want to trade on real-world outcomes the way they trade on stocks. Those headlines are real. But the more durable story of 2026 is quieter, and it is unfolding one layer beneath the exchanges, in the payment rails, banking, and settlement infrastructure that decide whether real money can actually move at the speed these markets trade.
For most of the past year, that plumbing has been the industry's weakest link. Prediction markets run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The banking system behind them does not. Above a few thousand dollars, the only reliable way to move serious money into an exchange has been a bank wire, and wires do not clear on nights, weekends, or holidays, which is precisely when a contract can swing hardest. A trader who wants to add capital to a position at midnight on a Saturday has, until recently, simply been out of luck until Monday morning. For a market maker running positions across several venues at once, the problem compounds: capital gets pre-funded and stranded in separate accounts, where it sits idle instead of working.
Two forces collided this year to make that gap impossible to ignore. First, credit cards kept disappearing as a funding option. A growing list of states and operators has moved to restrict card deposits for betting and prediction-market accounts, which closed off the fast, high-limit rail that heavy players quietly relied on. What replaced it, ACH transfers that take days to settle, or wires bound by banking hours, was slower and clumsier at exactly the moment demand was accelerating. Second, the regulatory picture sharpened. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission advanced new rulemaking on prediction markets, with a public comment window that closed in late July, pulling the category further into the mainstream, regulated financial system and raising the bar for how compliant the money movement behind it has to be.
The market's response has been a scramble to build the missing rails, and the funding flowing into that layer tells the story. In May, crypto payments network Mesh, fresh off a $75 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, announced a partnership with Kalshi to let users fund accounts directly from crypto wallets like Coinbase, Binance, and MetaMask. The same month, global payments startup Fun raised $72 million to build a payments layer spanning crypto and cash, with a dedicated sports-and-gaming solution. And in late July, ProphetX, a CFTC-regulated, sports-native exchange, closed a $35 million round aimed squarely at building out a B2B platform for the category. Different companies, different angles, one through-line: the smart money is betting on infrastructure, not on any single outcome.
That is the context in which EDGE Markets raised its own capital. The New York fintech closed a $29.2 million Series A this summer to build banking and real-time-payment infrastructure purpose-built for prediction markets, and, unlike the crypto-wallet connectors, to do it inside the regulated banking system. As founder and CEO Seni Thomas told PYMNTS, EDGE's accounts are designed to push funds into venues like Kalshi in real time, around the clock, with deposits held at an FDIC-insured partner bank, closing the weekend-wire gap that has quietly capped how much capital could reach these markets. EDGE has said publicly that an account can move as much as $10 million a day, with transfers that clear in seconds rather than days.
The distinction between the two dominant approaches matters, because they solve different halves of the same problem. Crypto-wallet rails, like the Mesh–Kalshi integration, make it easier to move digital assets you already hold into an exchange, a real convenience for the crypto-native trader. Bank-grade infrastructure like EDGE's is aimed at the harder question institutional traders keep raising: how to move large sums of real money, instantly and compliantly, across multiple venues without stranding capital in a separate account at each one. Thomas has described the core inefficiency plainly, capital pre-funded across five venues is "dead capital," sitting idle instead of working. Solving that is less about any single deposit and more about treating the entire category like the regulated financial market it is becoming.
For institutions weighing whether to participate, the stakes are concrete. A prop desk or syndicate that cannot move money on a weekend cannot fully hedge a position when news breaks on a Saturday. A fund that has to leave collateral parked at four different exchanges is accepting a permanent drag on returns. As the category professionalizes, those frictions stop being annoyances and start being the difference between a viable strategy and an unworkable one, which is exactly why the infrastructure layer has attracted the capital it has.
The category is still early, and there's real work ahead: the CFTC's rules aren't final yet, and the licensing behind the most ambitious institutional products, including EDGE's own broker and clearing registrations, is still in process. But the shape of the opportunity has come into focus in a way it hadn't a year ago. The next phase of prediction markets will be won less on which exchange has the best odds and more on which company builds the financial plumbing that lets serious money move as fast as the markets themselves. That's where the real money is going in 2026, and it's the ground EDGE was built to compete on.
