Data & Insights: Predicting the World Cup; No Stable Interest

 World Prediction Cup

• Polymarket's “Soccer” category saw over $2 billion in volume during the first ten days of the World Cup, a 300% increase over the prior ten-day period.
  • At the same time, daily average volume for the category grew from $53 million in the month before kickoff to ~$220 million during the tournament so far.
  • The mechanical driver behind this growth is straightforward: the world’s most popular, most-anticipated, quadrennial tournament, having multiple daily sports matches for an entire month, where each match is a short-dated event market that resolves within 90 minutes.
• Polymarket isn’t the only prediction market that has enjoyed the fruits of the World Cup, as Kalshi's aggregated open interest (OI) reached a record $1.16 billion on Thursday, the first time the platform’s OI surpassed the billion mark.
  • This marks a 350% YTD increase for Kalshi’s OI.
  • Interestingly, Polymarket’s OI levels have remained relatively flat even during the World Cup, while the OI in Polymarket’s US arm, which is also CFTC-regulated like Kalshi, has only increased modestly, failing to even reach its April 2026 highs.
• The more interesting story to highlight, therefore, lies in the Polymarket-Kalshi OI divergence.
  • Kalshi’s OI has been compounding faster than its trading volume, indicating a user base with longer hold periods on betting positions and the emergence of larger directional positioning rather than scalping.
  • Kalshi's CFTC-regulated rails and direct USD on-ramp give it a structural edge for US institutional and high-net-worth dollar investors who prefer not to custody offshore, and the World Cup is the first event in Kalshi's history large enough to surface that demand at scale.
  • Kalshi, being a regulated US sportsbook with a settlement engine, also means it is competing directly with the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel, rather than just Polymarket US.

Stablecoin Disinterest

• Google search volume for "Stablecoins" fell to 31 in June so far, down from 98 in May and its highest-ever reading of 100 in August 2025.
  • And while the month of June has not ended, meaning the current reading covers a partial month, when pro-rated to a full month it lands near 45, which implies a 54% month-over-month decline regardless.
  • The August 2025 search peak coincided with discussions of the passage of the GENIUS Act and a wave of issuer announcements from Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and several US retail banks.
• The decline in search volumes this month coincides with aggregate stablecoin supply having reversed its 10-month expansion.
  • At the beginning of June 2026, total aggregate stablecoin supply peaked at just under $300 billion, and in the three weeks since, it has declined slightly by $5 billion.
  • Total stablecoin supply is now up just a measly 0.23% YTD.
  • In comparison, total stablecoin supply grew by 56% in 2024 and 46% in 2025.
• Speaking of these periods, in 2024 and early 2025, search interest led stablecoin supply growth, as Google queries for "stablecoins" surged in August 2025 when supply was in its steepest accumulation phase, and the search peak coincided with the strongest single-month supply addition of the cycle ($16.0 billion in August 2025).
  • The June 2026 print breaks that pattern because search is collapsing while supply is contracting, which is consistent with a fully-marginal retail audience that has already onboarded onto stablecoins.
  • The "stablecoin moment” likely already happened in 2025, with the passage of the GENIUS Act, the Circle IPO, and a wave of bank-issued stablecoin announcements, fully discounted into supply, meaning there is no new retail cohort left to acquire at the same incremental cost. 
  • It will be worth watching Q4 2026, when the GENIUS Act regulatory clock starts and the first window in which US bank-issued stablecoins can compete for the same float that USDT and USDC currently dominate.

Mining Empty 

• Bitcoin miner revenue has ground lower for most of the past year, with the 7-day moving average now sitting near $30 million per day, down from the $50 million-plus levels seen last summer. Transaction fees have nearly vanished from the mix, contributing under $250,000 to that total, making them a rounding error compared to the block subsidy. 
  • BTC has traded near $62,500 against JPMorgan's roughly $78,000 production cost estimate, a gap that has held for five straight months, the longest stretch this cycle. That's notable because production costs have historically served as a soft price floor.
• An estimated 20% of miners are now unprofitable at current prices, and the stress shows up at the network level too. The beta of mining difficulty to bitcoin's price has climbed to 0.62 over the past six months, as higher-cost operators increasingly power machines on and off with price rather than mining through losses.
  • Difficulty fell 10% in the second week of June, the second drawdown of that size this year after a similar move in January, both arriving during extended stretches of sub-cost pricing.
• Public miners have leaned on balance sheets rather than cut deeper, selling more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter to cover operating costs.
• With the next halving still years out, the subsidy curve only moves in one direction. Fee revenue is the one variable miners can still influence, and its persistence near multi-year lows leaves margin recovery dependent almost entirely on price.

Equities Never Sleep

• New chart alert! We’re now tracking daily derivatives volume for tokenized equities across exchanges, including names like Tesla, Alphabet, and Amazon, as well as tokenized indexes and forex. The category has scaled quickly. Daily volume now sits near $5 billion, roughly 10x the ~$500 million seen at the start of the year.
  • Hyperliquid leads the category by a wide margin, with Binance running second. The remaining six venues we're tracking, OKX, Bitget, Lighter, Coinbase, Bybit, and Ostium, split a comparatively small remainder, a concentration pattern consistent with how crypto derivatives markets have historically consolidated around a handful of venues.
• This growth is specifically in derivatives volume, meaning synthetic exposure through perpetuals rather than directly held 1:1-backed shares. Coinbase and Kraken have both been pushing 1:1-backed tokenized stock products in parallel, but those remain smaller and more regulatory-constrained, while the derivatives side has scaled offshore with comparatively fewer restrictions.
  • Regulatory clarity is still catching up to the volume. The SEC clarified in January that tokenized securities fall under existing federal securities law regardless of being onchain, and is reportedly now working on an innovation exemption that would let institutions experiment with onchain equities without full registration.
• The split between fast-scaling derivatives volume and slower-moving, more compliant spot tokenization is likely to persist until that exemption framework, or something like it, materializes. Whether regulatory clarity ends up accelerating the spot side or simply legitimizing the derivatives venues that already dominate volume is the more interesting question for the back half of the year.

The Vanishing Marginal Bid

• With the year roughly half over, BTC and ETH sit down 27% and 41% YTD, respectively, a stark divergence from QQQ, up around 20% over the same stretch.
  • Underperformance against equities tends to be self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting. As crypto lags the benchmark allocators are measured against, it becomes easier to justify trimming or omitting the asset class from a portfolio entirely, which removes a marginal source of demand and extends the very underperformance that triggered the decision in the first place.
• Strategy illustrates the mechanism at the corporate level. Saylor's company spent 2024 and 2025 issuing equity at a premium to its bitcoin holdings and using the proceeds to buy more, a flywheel that depended on MSTR trading above the value of its BTC. That premium has now inverted, with mNAV running near 0.77x on a basic basis, meaning the market values the company below its bitcoin alone.
  • With the flywheel reversed, Strategy sold bitcoin in late May for the first time in years, 32 BTC, to fund distributions on its STRC preferred stock, reviving questions about whether a larger portion of its 846,842 BTC could eventually follow if STRC's roughly $1.6 billion/year in obligations outpace available cash. 
• It's ironic that the entity that absorbed some of the largest marginal bitcoin demand on the way up is now the balance sheet regulators, analysts, and traders are watching most closely on the way down.