Polymarket's 283K Loyalists vs. 2,500 Confident Conventioneers 📈

Prediction markets have arrived on cable news tickers and wire copy, but the audience at the center of NEXTPredict — the summit running October 22 and 23 at Convene, Hudson Yards in New York — was built to bridge journalism and the category. Organizers expect more than 50 speakers and 2,500 attendees, according to Pierre Lindh, co-founder and managing director of NEXT.io, who said the event is "bringing the category to broader audiences." The programme, designed to be camera-ready, added CNBC correspondent Contessa Brewer and CNN senior reporter Marshall Cohen in August, booked around the midterms. Media allocations have expanded from 50 passes to between 100 and 200. "B2B panel content does not move a national desk," Lindh told PredictCentr in August, noting that prediction market stories reach an audience far larger than the iGaming trade he came from, and "nobody was serving it with real journalistic standards."

Lindh acknowledged a tension in the agenda between news-driven content and structural market discussions, observing that "the story that gets the summit on air is not the story delegates are paying to be in the room for, and both have to be true at the same time." Institutional attention has been building alongside media coverage. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon told CBS in April that the bank was weighing an entry into the space, while describing most activity as closer to gambling than investing and ruling out sports and politics. Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon disclosed meetings with both of the largest operators on the firm's January earnings call.

Distribution has outpaced the actual user base. Polymarket's monthly active users sit around 283,300, measured by Token Terminal as unique addresses making a revenue-generating transaction, down from a peak above 750,000 in the spring. Kalshi said it took on 3 million new users over the 2026 World Cup, with more than $1.2 billion traded on the tournament winner contract, a record for a single market, though volume on non-match days ran well below match days. "Our volumes are where the news is at," chief executive Tarek Mansour told CNBC in July. A Langston Co. survey projects the share of crypto traders using prediction markets rising from 22% to 27%, with retail money largely rotating in from crypto rather than arriving fresh to speculation.