El Salvador President Nayib Bukele called attention to prediction markets amid increasing bets that the country’s Bitcoin holdings will hit $1 billion by year-end.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele called attention to prediction markets amid increasing bets that the country’s Bitcoin holdings will hit $1 billion by year-end.
Bukele took to X on Thursday to tweet about Kalshi’s prediction market, which shows increasing betting activity on El Salvador’s Bitcoin (BTC) holdings hitting $1 billion by late 2025.
“I could do the funniest thing right now,” Bukele said, as the odds of El Salvador hitting a $1 billion Bitcoin milestone before November jumped from 20% to 38% on Kalshi on Thursday.
Soon after Bukele’s post, rival platform Polymarket listed a similar bet, where the odds of a $1 billion Bitcoin milestone by December 2025 stood at 43%.
Kalshi tracking the odds since mid-August
Kalshi’s prediction market on El Salvador’s $1 billion Bitcoin holdings has been active since mid-August, with the “before December 2025” bet holding near 24% and “before November 2025” hovering around 18% until the last few days.
Following the spike to as high as 38%, the “before November 2025” bet dropped to 27%, while the “before December 2025” bet hovered around 35%.
While Kalshi had been tracking the odds of El Salvador’s Bitcoin holdings reaching $1 billion for several days, rival platform Polymarket only introduced a similar market following Bukele’s tweet.
Related: Bitcoin investment banks coming to El Salvador — Gov regulator
“New Polymarket: Will El Salvador hold $1 billion of Bitcoin by…?” the platform posted on X just hours after Bukele highlighted Kalshi’s market on Thursday.
Cointelegraph approached Kalshi and Polymarket for comments regarding the market listing policies, but had not received any responses by the time of publication.
Controversy around El Salvador’s Bitcoin holdings
While Kalshi and Polymarket are set to capitalize on the rising optimism around El Salvador’s Bitcoin holdings, neither of the platforms created betting markets concerning a previous controversy.
In July, El Salvador’s central bank president, Douglas Pablo Rodríguez Fuentes, and minister of finance, Jerson Rogelio Posada Molina, claimed that El Salvador had stopped buying Bitcoin after signing the $1.4 billion loan deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2024.
Related: Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele can now run for election indefinitely
Despite those claims being part of El Salvador’s official communication with the IMF, Bukele and El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office continued tweeting about new Bitcoin purchases, with holdings currently being reported at 6,282 Bitcoin ($709 million).
As of now, neither Juan Carlos Reyes, president of El Salvador’s National Commission on Digital Assets, nor any other contacted parties have responded to Cointelegraph’s request in July asking them to clarify the controversy.
The news came amid the prediction markets gaining momentum, with former Polymarket and Kalshi executive Toni Gemayel announcing a $15 million raise from investors like Coinbase Ventures for the prediction market platform Clearing Company.
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