The best prediction market apps let you trade a contract on how a game turns out instead of betting against a sportsbook’s fixed odds. The price moves the same way a stock does, based on what other traders are willing to pay, not on what a sportsbook decides. Below, we cover the welcome bonuses, fees, and legal status of the top platforms carrying real sports volume, plus how the pricing actually compares to your usual sportsbook.
Best Prediction Market Apps 2026
Get $100 in Predicts Bonus When You Trade $1 for 5 Days
Make Predictions on Real World Events Right in Your Phone
Trade on Sports to Culture, Financials, Crypto and More
Get $100 in Predicts Bonus When You Trade $1 for 5 Days
Make Predictions on Real World Events Right in Your Phone
Trade on Sports to Culture, Financials, Crypto and More
Huge Range of CFTC-Approved Markets (Sports, Tech, and More)
Compete with Others & Climb the Leaderboards
No User Limiting on Trades
Huge Range of CFTC-Approved Markets (Sports, Tech, and More)
Compete with Others & Climb the Leaderboards
No User Limiting on Trades
Deposit $10, Get a $50 Trading Bonus
Live Trade with the Biggest Payouts at the Largest Prediction Market in the World
Deposit $10, Get a $50 Trading Bonus
Live Trade with the Biggest Payouts at the Largest Prediction Market in the World
America's #1 Sports Prediction Market
Same Sports Moments, Bigger Payouts
Choose from Straights, Player Props, Parlays & More
America's #1 Sports Prediction Market
Same Sports Moments, Bigger Payouts
Choose from Straights, Player Props, Parlays & More
Get $150 in Bonuses Paid Over 14 Days
DraftKings is Now Available Nationwide
Browse Markets like Sports, Crypto, Tech & More
Get $150 in Bonuses Paid Over 14 Days
DraftKings is Now Available Nationwide
Browse Markets like Sports, Crypto, Tech & More
Complete a Task in the Crypto.com App to Unlock up to 1 Bitcoin Worth of CRO Rewards
America’s All-In-One Trading Platform
Manage Your Crypto, Stocks, Predictions & Card Spend Seamlessly
Complete a Task in the Crypto.com App to Unlock up to 1 Bitcoin Worth of CRO Rewards
America’s All-In-One Trading Platform
Manage Your Crypto, Stocks, Predictions & Card Spend Seamlessly
Best Prediction Market Bonuses Right Now
Here is an in-depth look at the prediction markets you can sign up for right now.
FanDuel Predicts: Best for Trading in States Without a Sportsbook
FanDuel Predicts runs on a joint venture between Flutter, FanDuel’s parent company, and CME Group, with CME supplying the exchange infrastructure behind every contract you trade. The product was built specifically for states where FanDuel doesn’t already hold a sportsbook license, so it’s expanding FanDuel’s footprint into new territory rather than competing with the sportsbook FanDuel already runs elsewhere.
The current sign-up offer gives new uses who trade $1 for 5 days $100 in Predicts Bonus. If you’re used to a straightforward deposit match, know that FanDuel Predicts has previously structured its welcome offer as a small trade completed on several consecutive days rather than a single lump-sum bonus, so read the exact mechanics on the claim page before you fund your account.
FanDuel Predicts also notably excludes tribal land from its footprint even in states where it operates, a more cautious approach to jurisdictional boundaries than some competitors have taken.
OG.com: Best for Live In-Game Trading
OG.com is one of the newer prediction markets, and it’s leaned hard into live, in-game trading as its differentiator, alongside a dedicated parlay builder and leaderboards for competitive traders. Sports is a major focus, but you’ll also find markets on pop culture, finance, and company news.
New users get $25 in bonus funds after trading $25, no promo code required. Read the fine print before you trade toward it: the promotion window is seven days from account verification, each qualifying trade needs to be worth at least $25, and any trade priced at 80% probability or higher doesn’t count toward the requirement. Trades placed using reward funds don’t count either, and a trade only counts once it actually settles.
Polymarket: Best for Liquidity and Market Variety
Polymarket built its reputation on the largest, fastest-moving markets in the world, particularly around elections and geopolitical events. Its return to U.S. users runs through a separate CFTC-regulated entity, Polymarket US, along with its affiliated clearing organization, since the original global platform isn’t built for U.S. compliance requirements.
The welcome offer here is one of the cleanest in the category: deposit $10 with the code LINEUPS and Polymarket credits your account with a $50 trading bonus. No initial trade is required first, which is a notable break from the “trade X, get Y” structure most competitors use. That bonus lands as trading credit, not cash, so it needs to be used to make trades rather than withdrawn directly.
Funding runs primarily through cryptocurrency, which gives Polymarket fast settlement and global reach but also puts it in a more complicated legal position for some U.S. users depending on where they live.
ProphetX: Best for Sports-Only Peer-to-Peer Trading
ProphetX runs as a peer-to-peer exchange built specifically around sports outcomes, including player props and parlay-style combinations, rather than the broad politics-and-culture catalog most competitors carry. That narrower focus is by design: ProphetX wants to be the sports specialist in a category that’s increasingly chasing breadth.
Sign up with the code LINEUPS and trade at least $50 to unlock a $75 trading bonus, which is delivered in installments rather than all at once. That structure rewards users who plan to keep trading past their first session, since you’ll need to stay active to collect the full amount.
Because ProphetX is a true peer-to-peer order book, your price depends on who else is trading at that moment. That can work in your favor when you’re patient enough to set your own price and wait for a match, but it also means liquidity can be thinner on less popular games than it is on Polymarket or the bigger CME-backed platforms.
Underdog Predict: Best for Simple, Sports-First Contracts
Underdog approaches prediction markets from its fantasy sports roots rather than a live order book. Contracts cover spreads, totals, moneylines, and parlays, and Underdog Predict pulls that pricing from multiple partner exchanges rather than running everything through its own infrastructure, which is a real advantage for market coverage.
There are two offers stacked here, and you can claim both with the code LINEUPSPM. The first is a straightforward 50% match on your first deposit, up to $1,000, though the exact match percentage is lower in a handful of states where deposit-match promotions face extra restrictions. The second is a game called Keep Your Million: you start with a fake $1,000,000 bankroll, answer a series of higher-or-lower player questions, and whatever’s left in that pot after your run converts into real bonus funds. It’s a genuinely different mechanic from anything else on this list, closer to a prediction game than a standard sign-up match.
Crypto.com: Best for Existing Crypto.com Users
Crypto.com folds prediction markets into its existing crypto exchange, letting users who already hold assets there trade event contracts without opening a separate account. Markets tend to run smaller and less liquid than on dedicated prediction exchanges, but the convenience of staying inside one ecosystem is the appeal here.
The current welcome offer listed is up to 1 BTC in CRO rewards for completing a task inside the Crypto.com app. Worth flagging directly: some competitor sites are currently advertising a simpler flat $50 sign-up bonus for Crypto.com instead of the BTC-and-CRO structure, which suggests this offer may have changed recently.
DraftKings Predictions: Best for Existing DraftKings Users
DraftKings Predictions is built as a CFTC-registered introducing broker, giving customers access to event contracts traded on CME’s exchange. It’s designed to feel like an extension of the DraftKings app you already know, rather than a separate trading product you have to learn from scratch.
Here’s what the current offer actually means in practice: spend $5 or more on your first trade, and DraftKings issues up to $150 in bonus funds, but not all at once. It arrives as three separate $50 installments, released roughly every seven days over a 14-day period, and you have to actively claim each installment within 7 days of it becoming available or it expires unused. The funds themselves are non-withdrawable Predictions Dollars that expire one year after they’re issued and have to be used to make further trades rather than cashed out.
Fanatics Markets: Best for Rewards Beyond Trading
Fanatics Markets is the only major prediction-market app where trading itself earns you something outside the app. Every contract you place accrues FanCash, Fanatics’ loyalty currency, whether the trade wins or loses, through the Fanatics ONE rewards program shared across Fanatics Markets, Sportsbook, and Casino.
Unlike platform credit that’s only good for more trades, FanCash spends like store credit across the wider Fanatics ecosystem — official merchandise, event tickets, Fanatics Fest experiences, and collectibles, as well as future trades. Combined with a broad category lineup (sports, politics and elections, finance and economics, cryptocurrency, and entertainment and culture), the app has also received praise for its clean interface and real-time pricing with no noticeable lag.
It’s a strong pick for traders who want their activity to count for more than just the next contract — operated by Morton St. Trading Investments, LLC, d/b/a Fanatics Markets, a CFTC-registered Futures Commission Merchant.
What Is a Prediction Market?
A prediction market is a contract tied to a single yes-or-no outcome, priced somewhere between $0.01 and $1.00 based on what traders think that outcome is worth. Say a contract on “Chiefs win Super Bowl LX” is trading at $0.18. That’s the market pricing roughly an 18% chance it happens, in dollars you can actually put money behind. Buy 100 of those contracts and you’ve spent $18. If the Chiefs win, every contract you’re holding settles at $1, turning that $18 into $100. If they lose, those same contracts settle at $0, and the $18 is gone.
That’s the whole mechanism. No point spread, no moneyline, no juice built into the number by a bookmaker. The price is just wherever the last trade happened to clear, and it updates every time someone new decides to buy or sell.
Compare that to a sportsbook, where a -150 favorite implies roughly a 60% win probability once you strip out the vig, a number the book chose and adjusted to balance its own liability, not a number the crowd arrived at by trading against each other. On a prediction market, there’s no house on the other side of your trade. You’re buying from or selling to other users directly, and the platform makes its money on a transaction fee rather than a built-in edge baked into every contract.
How Prediction Market Apps Work
Opening a position takes three taps: pick the event, pick a side, and decide whether you’re buying at the current price or setting your own and waiting for someone to match it. From there, the contract behaves less like a bet you’ve locked in and more like a stock you’re holding.
Say you buy that Chiefs contract at $0.18, and then their starting quarterback goes down with an injury a few weeks before the game, shifting the market’s expectations. The price might climb to $0.31 as other traders react to the news, well before the Super Bowl is even played. You don’t have to wait for a final score to see that move. Sell your position at $0.31 and you’ve locked in a 13-cent profit per contract, cashing out before the outcome is even decided.
If you hold instead, the contract settles automatically once the event ends. The platform checks the result against a source it defined ahead of time, usually the league’s official record or a named data provider, not a headline or a social media post, then pays out $1 per contract on the winning side while zeroing out the rest. No manual claims, no waiting on a payout desk.
That flexibility cuts both ways. You get to manage a position instead of being locked into a single outcome, but you also take on the same kind of market risk a stock trader deals with: a price that can move against you before you’ve decided what to do about it.
How Prediction Market Pricing Compares to a Sportsbook
A sportsbook sets a fixed price with a built-in hold, typically somewhere around 4.5%, before you ever place a bet. A prediction market doesn’t set anything itself. A contract trades between $0.01 and $1.00, and that price is wherever buyers and sellers currently agree the probability sits. A contract trading at $0.62 means the market is pricing that outcome at roughly a 62% chance.
| Sportsbook | Prediction Market | |
|---|---|---|
| Price set by | Oddsmaker, with a built-in hold | Order-book trading between users |
| Exiting early | Cash out at a book-set rate | Sell your contract to another trader at the current price |
| Settlement | Payout at the odds you locked in | Contract resolves to $1 or $0 |
| Regulator | State gaming commission | CFTC, though this is actively contested, see below |
That difference also shows up in how fast news moves the number. When a starting quarterback gets downgraded on the injury report, a sportsbook typically moves its line within minutes. On a prediction market, that same news shows up as a gradual shift in the contract’s trading price over the following hours as it filters through the order book, which means there’s a real window where reading the roster news early is worth more than it is at a sportsbook.
Which One’s Right for You?
If you want the fastest path from having an opinion to having a position down, a sportsbook is still the simpler product: fixed odds, one click, no order book to read. If you’re comfortable managing a position and want to exit early at a market-driven price instead of a book’s cash-out rate, a prediction market gives you more control at the cost of needing to actually watch the price.
Price is where it gets specific. On a straightforward moneyline or spread, a prediction market often beats a sportsbook on pure cost. A standard -110 sportsbook line has roughly a 4.5% hold baked in before you even place the bet, while most prediction market fees run closer to a percent or two of your position, sometimes less. That gap is real money on a straight side, especially if you’re trading it more than once.
Where sportsbooks still win outright is everything past the basic side. Player props, alternate lines, same-game parlays, and the sheer depth of markets on a given slate are still a sportsbook specialty. Prediction markets are building out parlay-style combos, but the pricing on those combined positions hasn’t caught up to what a sportsbook offers yet, so if you’re building anything more complex than a straight side or a total, you’ll typically get the better price at a sportsbook.
Many sports bettors end up using both: a prediction market for the straightforward side where the fee structure works in their favor, and a sportsbook for props, parlays, and anything that needs more market depth than an exchange can currently support.
Are Prediction Markets Legal Where You Live?
This is the most unsettled part of the entire category, and any source claiming a clean, stable state-by-state answer hasn’t kept up with the last few months.
The core dispute: the CFTC argues it has exclusive federal authority over these contracts because they’re regulated as swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act. A growing number of states disagree, arguing that a contract paying out based on whether a specific team wins a specific game is simply sports betting under a different name, and that it should require the same state license a sportsbook does.
That disagreement has now produced a genuine circuit split. In April 2026, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the federal preemption argument, meaning platforms could keep offering sports contracts in New Jersey without state interference. Then, on August 28, 2026, the Ninth Circuit went the other way entirely, ruling 3-0 that Kalshi’s sports event contracts are functionally sports bets rather than federally regulated swaps, and clearing Nevada to enforce its own gambling law against the platform. The Ninth Circuit’s opinion also noted that the facts in similar cases involving Robinhood and Crypto.com looked comparable, meaning the same reasoning could extend beyond just Kalshi. Separately, a federal judge in Utah ruled against Kalshi in early August 2026, granting the state summary judgment and rejecting the argument that federal registration shields sports contracts from Utah’s gambling ban.
With two federal appeals courts now disagreeing with each other, New Jersey has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the split. Meanwhile, a bipartisan bill in Congress, introduced by Senators Adam Schiff and John Curtis, would bar CFTC-registered platforms from listing any contract that resembles a sports bet in the first place, regardless of how the courts eventually rule.
None of that adds up to a stable map you can print out and trust for more than a few weeks. Treat every platform’s own stated availability at the moment you sign up as the only reliable answer.
Getting Started At Prediction Markets
Pick a market you already understand
Sports and major political events are the easiest entry point.
Read exactly what resolves the contract
Whether it’s $1 versus $0 before you trade it, not just the headline.
Check your state's current access
Do this at signup rather than relying on a list you saw elsewhere, given how much the legal picture above can shift.
Compare liquidity, not just price
A great implied price is worthless if there’s no one on the other side to fill your order.
Final Thoughts
Prediction markets aren’t a sportsbook with a rebrand. They’re a genuinely different way to hold a position on a game, and the right platform depends more on what you’re trying to do than which one has the flashiest headline bonus. Want the deepest liquidity and don’t mind funding with crypto? Polymarket’s $50-for-$10 offer is hard to beat. Only care about sports? ProphetX and Underdog are built for exactly that. Already living inside the DraftKings or Crypto.com app? Staying there saves you a second login, just read the bonus terms closely since none of these pay out as a single lump sum the way the headline number implies. The one thing every platform here has in common is a legal picture that’s still being fought out in federal court, so check your state’s current access before you fund an account, not after.
Prediction Market FAQs
Mechanically, no. A sportsbook sets fixed odds with a built-in edge, while a prediction market’s price floats based on what traders are willing to pay for it. When the underlying contract is about who wins a game, the outcome you’re exposed to ends up the same either way.
On exchange-style platforms like Polymarket or ProphetX, yes, you sell your contract to another trader at the current market price. Underdog’s contest-style contracts don’t work this way since there’s no live order book behind them.
No, and that’s true of every sports-focused prediction market right now, not just one platform. Availability depends on an active legal fight between federal and state regulators that’s still working its way toward the Supreme Court. Check current availability directly with the platform before you sign up.
On some platforms, yes, though it works a little differently than a sportsbook parlay. ProphetX and Underdog both build parlay-style combinations directly into their contract menus alongside straight sides and player props. DraftKings Predictions and Polymarket call theirs “combos,” bundling multiple contracts into a single position that only pays out if every leg resolves correctly, and DraftKings has said combo trades already account for close to a fifth of its total trading volume. The payout math works the same way a parlay does at a sportsbook, in that combining legs multiplies your potential return along with your risk, but you’re buying a bundled contract from other traders instead of getting odds set by a book. If a platform doesn’t explicitly list parlays or combos, check FanDuel Predicts, OG.com, and Crypto.com before assuming, you’ll need to buy each contract separately and manage them as individual positions.
Most prediction markets build a resolution deadline into each contract, and if the event doesn’t happen within that window, say a rained-out game with no rescheduled date, the contract is typically voided and your stake refunded rather than settled at $0. That said, the exact rule lives in each contract’s specific terms rather than one blanket policy across the platform, so check it before you trade anything with real postponement risk, like an outdoor game during severe weather season.
Generally, yes. Prediction market profits are typically treated as reportable income, and larger platforms often issue standard IRS tax forms once you cross certain trading or withdrawal thresholds in a calendar year. The exact form and threshold can vary by platform and by how a given contract type ends up classified. This isn’t tax advice, so talk to a tax professional about your specific situation, especially if you’re trading across more than one platform.
Most platforms set the bar at 18, which is younger than the 21-plus most U.S. sportsbooks require. That’s not universal, though. Underdog, for example, requires 21+ in a handful of states even though its baseline is 18 elsewhere, and other operators carve out their own state-by-state exceptions. Confirm the age requirement for your specific state before you sign up.
