Polymarket dabbles in parlays as the NFL season looms

• Polymarket is getting onboard with parlays as interest in this type of trades mounts
• Parlays are one of the most popular form of sports bets
• Kalshi has already launched a similar feature

Polymarket is exploring parlay-style prediction markets, drawing on the huge momentum of this particular type of sports bet and adapting it to the realities of binary exchange-traded events.

"Parlays" are now becoming the new normal on preidction market exchanges

By using the Yes/No model, Polymarket continues to tread on sports betting territory while offering an alternative product regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

This strategy has earned it pushback from state gaming regulators, but Polymarket is determined to push on, with the company launching its first parlays on August 5, 2026, and now looking to scale ahead of the new NFL season.

This comes at a time when Polymarket’s sports event contracts account for 99% of its exchange volume of $15.5bn so far in 2026, indicating how reliant the company has grown on the vertical, and further raising the stakes in state cases against the prediction market.

The Polymarket parlays follow the exact same logic as that of traditional sports bets. The parlays Polymarket allows will run between 2 and 10 legs, whereby a "leg" is a selection in a sports betting parlor, which is now applied to Polymarket’s own event contracts.

The more legs a consumer puts on their trade, the higher the reward becomes if all legs come out successful. However, the company uses another way to denote these trades, calling them Combinatorial Athletic Outcome Contracts or CAOCs, with a certification obtained on May 20, 2026.

Even outside of prediction markets, parlays are one of the biggest - if not the biggest drivers of sports betting handle, referring to the total amount wagered on sports.

No legal opposition is set to disrupt prediction market's growth

In fact, FanDuel may be collecting as much as 70% of all NFL and NBA bets wagered with the platform through parlays, based on data for 2025. But Polymarket is not the only company in the sector to have long realized how powerful CAOCs or parlays can be.

Kalshi has already launched similar event contracts, allowing consumers to pick a Yes/No outcome. Kalshi saw as much as $9bn traded on these types of wagers in the first 18 days of August, which is nearly half of the total trading volume over the period - or 42%.

Adding these types of trades will fuel opposition against the platforms, with gaming regulators and attorneys general heaping criticism on what they have essentially described as gambling.

Polymarket, Kalshi and other sector companies have denied these allegations, citing their status as federally regulated exchanges.

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