Kalshi rolled out its first player prop bets just in time for kickoff Thursday night, letting users wager on who will score touchdowns in Week 1 NFL games. First, next, anytime, or even multiple trips to the end zone are now fair game. Yardage and defensive stats remain off-limits, presumably because baby steps are safer when you’re trying to keep the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from noticing you’ve wandered into sportsbook territory.
The timing is no accident. Polymarket just got the nod from regulators to re-enter the US, and PredictIt continues chugging along with its more academic flavor of political markets. Even Underdog, better known for fantasy contests, announced a sports prediction market with Crypto.com. Kalshi’s touchdown props look less like innovation and more like keeping pace in a league suddenly crowded with rivals.
Polymarket has been given the green light to go live in the USA by the @CFTC.
Credit to the Commission and Staff for their impressive work. This process has been accomplished in record timing.
Stay tuned https://t.co/NVziTixpqO
— Shayne Coplan
(@shayne_coplan) September 3, 2025
Self-certification made the move possible, that lovely process where an exchange essentially tells the CFTC “we’re doing this unless you stop us” and then waits to see if anyone in Washington is awake enough to care. No objection yet, which means betting on Deebo Samuel finding the end zone is officially a regulated activity in America.
Not content with touchdowns, Kalshi also filed to self-certify parlays and multi-leg bets this week. That would let users mash together multiple outcomes into a single wager, moving one step closer to the state-regulated sportsbooks it insists it isn’t copying.
Polymarket, never shy about leaning on its community, took the same idea to Discord. Traders are now invited to submit parlay combinations of two to six existing markets. The top three to five ideas get put up for a quick vote twice a week, with winning suggestions actually listed on the site.
Think of it as crowdsourced gambling innovation, or possibly just a way to outsource product development to the same people who think betting on rainfall totals is an investment strategy.
So Week 1 of the NFL season doubles as Week 1 of the prediction market parlay wars. Kalshi is pushing touchdown props, Polymarket is dangling Discord votes, and the CFTC continues to play the role of slightly bemused chaperone.
And while Kalshi was busy with touchdowns, Polymarket found itself caught up in the far more important matter of the Pentagon Pizza Index. After Trump’s Oval Office announcement and his surprise decision to rebrand the Pentagon as the Department of War, speculation bubbled up that late-night pizza orders around the Pentagon were spiking.
What’s on this week’s prediction markets
Kalshi
Kalshi spent the first week trying to wedge itself into the national sports conversation without technically offering anything you could put money on. When Eagles defensive tackle Jalen Carter was tossed before the first snap for apparently spitting on Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, Kalshi’s social feeds lit up with commentary.
No market, no bets, just a steady drip of viral-adjacent content. The effect was something like your accountant trying to crack jokes at the bar. Technically fine, but you can tell what they really want is for someone to say “hey, maybe you should run a line on that.”
Did Dak spit at Jalen Carter first???
pic.twitter.com/B9tVwvdbTl
— Kalshi Football (@KalshiFB) September 5, 2025
Where Kalshi had no hesitation was in politics. Ahead of Donald Trump’s Oval Office announcement on September 3, the exchange posted a blockbuster $536,807 in volume on the question “What will Trump say during the Announcement in the Oval Office originally scheduled for 2:00 pm ET?”
Around 75% of bettors correctly predicted that he’d mention Joe Biden, while 74% guessed he would rename the Pentagon the “Department of War.” He did exactly that, giving a rare moment where both Kalshi’s bettors and Trump himself delivered as advertised.
Trump is expected to make an announcement in 5 minutes
Our traders forecast Trump will say:
• "Biden" 75%
• "Department of war" 74%
• "Border" 66%
• "Russia" 63%
• "Ukraine" 56%
• "Emergency" 53%
• "Putin" 48%
• "Hoax" 43%
• "Maduro" 38%
• "Newsom" 28%— Kalshi (@Kalshi) September 2, 2025
As for the industry’s own trash talk, that happened on social media, where Polymarket’s William LeGate accused Kalshi’s CEO of directing staff to “copy everything Polymarket does… our moat is regulatory capture.”
When I joined Kalshi a year ago today, Tarek made their mission clear: “copy everything Polymarket does… our moat is regulatory capture.”
Today, that moat no longer exists.
I couldn’t be more proud of my decision to join Polymarket — why copy the best when you can build it? https://t.co/W9jrfY5S1e
— LeGate (@williamlegate) September 3, 2025
Kalshi affiliates promptly called the claim misinformation. It’s a fight unlikely to move markets, but it does provide the spectacle of prediction exchanges wagering credibility in real time, one subtweet at a time.
“To boast of battle and then retreat is the mark of a hollow warrior.” – Sun Tzu
Will blocked me after posting blatant misinformation about @Kalshi (insulting to our hardworking team), + then hid my reply that called him out for lacking backbone.
Streisand effect William pic.twitter.com/m2qGFU6rH2
— Allan Maman (@allanmaman) September 4, 2025
Polymarket
Polymarket has been busy this week, though not with pizza. The so-called Pizza Index, a half-serious half-conspiratorial measure of national security tensions based on late-night orders to Pentagon-adjacent pizza joints, spiked in chatter after Trump’s Department of War rebrand.
The idea is if generals are stuck in the basement eating pepperoni at 2 a.m., something big is about to happen. According to the Pentagon Pizza Index site, which yes, really exists, things remain calm. No extra-large mushroom pies on the ledger, no missile strikes on the horizon.
Confusingly, Polymarket itself does not offer an actual wager on pizza deliveries, though the Pizza Index site helpfully slaps a Polymarket plug-in on the page anyway. It is either synergy or sabotage, depending on whether you believe mozzarella is a leading indicator.
Where the action actually sits is in Trump’s political survival. Polymarket’s traders have already shoveled $1,106,191 into markets on whether he will resign by the end of this year. The odds sit at a measly 6%. The chance he bows out next year clocks in at 5%. The best Trump exit line available gives him a 10% shot of being gone by December 31, 2026, which in the world of prediction markets qualifies as optimistic.
Meanwhile, out the door at the CFTC, Commissioner Kristin Johnson took a parting swipe at her colleagues, lamenting that prediction markets have “too few guardrails and too little visibility.”
A fair point, though one suspects most bettors prefer it that way. After all, guardrails keep cars on the road, but they also make it harder to veer into oncoming traffic for fun.
Featured image: Canva / Grok
The post Prediction Pulse: Trump announcement stirs market chatter as Pentagon Pizza Index stays flat appeared first on ReadWrite.
