One day after Kalshi began offering customizable parlays on NFL games for the first time at scale on Sept. 29, DraftKings and FanDuel parent Flutter saw their stocks lose billions of dollars off their market caps.
The custom parlays that caused such a ripple effect, however, remain a tiny part of Kalshi’s overall activity. They only saw $6 million in trading volume—the go-to prediction market activity metric—in their first week on the platform. In their second week, that number rose to just $10.1 million.
Kalshi initially launched only single-game parlays but has since added multi-game parlays to its offerings. There was $5.5 million in volume on same-page parlays and $4.6 million on multi-game parlays between Oct. 6 and Oct. 12. Combined, parlays represented roughly 3.1% of the $330.5 million in total volume on Kalshi’s NFL contracts last week, and an even smaller 1.1% of its overall volume.
For comparison, parlays have accounted for more than 60% of sportsbook revenue and around 30% of handle in Maryland, Illinois and New Jersey this year.
Given the popularity of parlays at sportsbooks, it’s little surprise that Kalshi’s unexpected parlay feature launch—after previously only taking wagers on individual events such as game result, point spread and player props—was considered a big deal. But the notion that Kalshi would immediately cannibalize parlay betting activity on FanDuel, DraftKings and other gambling apps has not yet come to fruition.
Still, Kalshi has been encroaching on the sports betting operators in a broader sense. During the four weeks between Sept. 1 and Sept. 28, encompassing the first month of the NFL season, there was $1.13 billion in trading volume on Kalshi’s NFL contracts, and another $811 million on college football. Sports overall accounted for around 90% of trading volume.
Kalshi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This past Monday through Sunday, Kalshi eclipsed $900 million in volume for the second consecutive week, surpassing its total from the week of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
