El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has drawn attention to prediction markets as speculation rises over the country’s Bitcoin reserves reaching $1 billion by year-end.
On Wednesday, Bukele posted on X about Kalshi’s prediction market, which shows a surge in bets that El Salvador’s Bitcoin (BTC $113,206) holdings will hit the milestone by late 2025.
“I could do the funniest thing right now,” Bukele wrote, as odds of hitting $1 billion before November climbed from 20% to 38% on Kalshi.
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Following his post, rival platform Polymarket launched a similar market, where traders currently give a 43% chance that El Salvador’s Bitcoin stash will cross $1 billion by December 2025.
El Salvador Sees Surging Odds on Bitcoin Milestone
Kalshi’s prediction market on El Salvador’s $1 billion Bitcoin milestone has been live since mid-August, with odds for “before December 2025” holding around 24% and “before November 2025” near 18% until just recently.
After a sharp surge that pushed the “before November 2025” bet as high as 38%, the odds later settled back to 27%, while the “before December 2025” contract remained steady at roughly 35%.
Although Kalshi had been tracking these probabilities for days, rival platform Polymarket only launched a similar market after President Nayib Bukele’s tweet drew attention to the bets.
Separately, in July, El Salvador’s central bank president Douglas Pablo Rodríguez Fuentes and finance minister Jerson Rogelio Posada Molina stated that the country had stopped accumulating Bitcoin following its $1.4 billion loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2024.
