Wild Expedition

About Wild Expedition

As the U.S. warms to the idea of online sports betting, the NCAA has taken steps to protect its athletes. Deputy General Counsel of the NCAA, Naima Stevenson Starks sat down with Calvinayre.com’s Becky Liggero Fontana to explain her organisation’s stance towards betting involving student athletes and maintaining the integrity of those competitions. 

Stevenson Starks shared those concerns that the NCAA has towards online sports betting in the U.S.:

“The two [concerns] are the integrity of athletic competition, and how that could potentially be impacted by a proliferation of legalized sports wagering. And then the second is really the health and well-being of student athletes.“

About Wild Expedition

If the research firm’s $190 billion taker volume estimate proves accurate, it’d represent a more than eightfold increase from the $22 billion taker turnover seen last year.

Potentially boding well for the Macquarie forecast are at least two factors. First, there are signs of turnover increases across a variety of yes/no exchanges. Second, volume surged to start September with those spikes arriving even before the NFL season kicked off.

As Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon points out, prediction markets generated $4.3 billion in taker volume during the first week of September without any help from the NFL, building on momentum from the 2026 World Cup. However, the NFL’s impact was immediate, with taker volume hitting a daily record during Week 1 of the campaign.

How to play Wild Expedition

Sahil Patel, founder of competitive intelligence provider Aldrin AI, said those relationships help explain Kalshi’s position.

“A lot of market makers want to go where there’s liquidity,” he said, adding that platform stability and Kalshi’s investment in the financial side of its market-maker relationships were also important. “I think Kalshi is a freight train that’s just kind of running away with it.”

Aldrin monitors product changes, advertising, social media activity, app-store rankings and trading volume across prediction market operators. Patel said the objective is to connect those indicators and show how a product launch supported by advertising affects volume and market share.