On a recent livestream of The Rollup, Chainlink Labs’ Head of Strategic Initiatives, William Reilly, sat down to discuss the recent surge in Chainlink-powered prediction markets around the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and how the industry will evolve in the future.
Last week, ADI Predictstreet, FIFA’s official prediction market partner, adopted Chainlink as its exclusive oracle infrastructure to power accurate market resolutions and instant payouts for over six billion fans during the world’s biggest sporting event. Myriad soon followed suit, announcing Chainlink as the exclusive infrastructure for its World Cup prediction markets.
Both platforms are leveraging the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a universal orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts.
Reilly said CRE essentially functions as an oracle-as-a-service platform, applying the same cryptographic benefits and decentralized technology that power 70% of global DeFi markets to bespoke data delivery.
He explained how Chainlink, which has enabled over $30 trillion in transaction value, emerged as essential infrastructure for prediction markets including Polymarket and Jupiter Exchange, as well as regulated crypto perps on Kalshi.
Many prediction markets still rely on human-operated “optimistic” oracles, which assume proposed event results are true unless challenged within a set time frame. Dispute resolution often relies on human subjectivity and arbitration by token-holder voting, causing latency periods of hours or days and challenge costs that can exceed the total trading volume.
These pitfalls pose a serious problem for global events like the World Cup.
“When games are one on top of another and you want to participate in many games, many rounds, one after another, you want that capital efficiency to come back to you quickly,” Reilly said.
“Wiith optimistic oracles, you see one to two hours for a settlement to occur because you need that human consensus.”
Chainlink, on the other hand, provides deterministic market outputs. CRE connects to offchain data sources like FIFA’s official league data and cross-references it with other data points like the order book itself.
“Once we see one, two, three matches across the data, we can deliver an extremely high-confidence datapoint for resolution of that market.”
Prediction markets represent one of the fastest-growing sectors in finance, with major platforms regularly handling up to $24 billion in monthly trading volume. Reilly estimates 80% of prediction markets are deterministic and have a known data point that Chainlink can securely and reliably deliver onchain.
He said much of Chainlink’s research and development is devoted to understanding how AI can function as a deterministic source of truth for prediction markets based on more subjective topics.
“That’s where we can go ahead and fill that last 20 to 30% hurdle and encompass the entirety of prediction markets.”
Watch the full interview.