107 Days, 600 markets, one $2,000 ceiling
Every day since April, our board scan pulls the ten most entertaining $1 markets off Kalshi and Polymarket and pins them to the homepage. We don't run the markets, we just watch them, screenshot the weirdness, and move on. This report is what happens when you keep those daily snapshots for 107 days and actually add them up: 600 unique markets, 1,068 board slots, five wild months of a prediction-market universe curated entirely by our own scanner.
The headline number: a Georgia GOP Senate primary longshot, a three-day Elon tweet-count band, a $175 WTI print, a 3AM bitcoin level, and an Ethereum coin-flip window all posted the same $1-pays-$2,000 line. Five different markets, five different corners of reality, one identical payout. That's not a coincidence, that's just what "very unlikely, priced accordingly" looks like when the scanner's doing its job.
The biggest longshots
The $2,000 tier is where the board gets genuinely unhinged. "Jonathan McColumn becomes Georgia's GOP Senate nominee" got the caption "in other news: a lottery ticket filing for office." The Elon tweet-count market ("140-164 tweets in three days") drew "the odds of this are the same as a controlled demolition landing on one specific tile." WTI hitting $175 got "in other news: someone's short-selling the sun." Crypto had its own flavor of absurd precision, a bitcoin level pinned to a specific hour ("someone set an alarm for this exact moment") and an Ethereum window so tight the board just called it "a dollar on whether the number goes left or right." All five $2,000 markets lasted exactly one day on the board.
- $666.67, Lebanon's Taqaddom Party topping the seat count ("Hezbollah pivoting to competitive pickleball")
- $500, Wesley Said leading Ligue 1 scoring
- $500, Solana crashing to $70
- $500, Bitcoin dipping to $58,000 ("500 to 1 that we all learn what capitulation means")
- $400, Kim Moon-soo's Gyeonggi governorship bid ("hello from the void")
The markets that wouldn't leave
Longshots flare and vanish, but a handful of markets just refused to roll off the board. NASA landing a person on the moon before 2028 logged 53 days on the board between April 26 and August 25, nearly half our whole coverage window, tagged "one small bet for man." Starship carrying humans to Mars before 2030 put in 18 days. Taylor Swift getting a papal audience this year ran 16 days under "Bejeweled, Vatican edit." The climate desk has its own recurring cast: an 8.0 Japan earthquake before 2030 (15 days), 2026 being the hottest year ever (14 days), and a California 8.0 before 2035 (14 days, still on the board as of the final snapshot). Rippling IPOing before Deel logged 12 days, tied with the Grammys' Record of the Year race.
One-day wonders
Of 600 unique markets we've ever tracked, 467 showed up for exactly one day and never came back, a 77.8% one-day share. The board is mostly a parade of things that mattered for a single 24-hour window and then got replaced by the next weird thing. That's by design; the scanner is chasing what's fresh and entertaining today, not building a stable of recurring favorites.
The wildest odds swings
"Trump drops more UFO files this month" swung from 3 cents to 65 cents across six tracked days, a 62-point round trip between May 28 and June 8. California's 8.0-before-2035 earthquake market swung 29 points over its 14-day run. The MLB perfect-game market jumped from 14.5 cents to 39.5 cents between May 30 and June 29. Kristi Noem's exit odds swung 24.3 points between June 27 and August 11, and David Sacks' exit odds moved 24 points over just five tracked days. Even "This May 2026 is the hottest May ever" swung from 2 cents to 23 cents inside five days.
The board, month over month
April was a soft launch, 58 board slots, median volume $8,108, max payout just $222.22. May exploded to 300 slots, median volume $11,808, mean payout $25.12, and the first $500 max payout. June got loud: median volume $25,285, mean payout $39.65, max payout hit our ceiling at $2,000. July held the intensity, still $2,000 max, mean payout $35.49, though board slots dropped to 250. August cooled to 160 slots, median volume $11,981, mean payout $22.10, max payout back to $500. Category-wise, "Other" (206) and "Science and Technology" (204) traded the top spot all year, with World (147), Climate and Weather (102), and Sports (99) next. Crypto, despite the wild one-day payouts, logged only 53 total appearances.
The honest caveats
Our board is a curated top-10 daily snapshot, not a full ledger of every market on Kalshi or Polymarket, this measures what made our board, not the full universe. Coverage has gaps: 12 missing days between July 25 and August 7, and another 3 days between August 11 and August 15. Category labels are the scanner's own automatic tags, useful for trend-spotting but imperfect at the edges. Every number above is illustrative market pricing at the time it was snapshotted, not a forecast, and nothing here is betting or financial advice.
Frequently asked questions
Is this every prediction market that existed during this period?
No, it's every market that made our daily top-10 board across 107 snapshot days between April 25 and August 26, 2026. Think of it as a highlight reel curated for entertainment value, not a full market census.
Why do so many markets only appear once?
Because the board refreshes daily and chases what's freshest and funniest, not what's most durable. 77.8% of the 600 unique markets we've tracked showed up for exactly one day, persistence is rare by design.
What's a "$1 pays $X" number actually mean?
It's the market price at the moment we snapshotted it, translated into a dollar payout, not a guarantee, and not fixed. Markets move, sometimes by 60 points in a week, as our odds-swing section shows.
Why did June look so different from April?
Board slots, volume, and payouts all scaled up as the scanner's coverage matured, April was 58 slots and a $222 max payout; by June that had grown to 300 slots and a $2,000 max. Growth in the archive, not necessarily growth in the underlying markets themselves.