Disco Beats

About Disco Beats

The mystery surrounding who won the $1.04 billion Powerball jackpot drawn on Aug. 12, 2026, has been solved—sort of. The Illinois Lottery announced that the winner came forward this week to claim the prize but chose to remain anonymous.

The big Powerball winner took advantage of Section 7.2 of the Illinois Lottery Law, which governs disclosure rules regarding winners’ identities.

Under Section 7.2, a winner of a prize of $250,000 or more can request to keep their name and municipality of residence confidential while completing their Illinois Lottery Winner Claim Form.

What is Disco Beats?

Across the market, operators delivered high double-digit gains compared with Labor Day weekend, which featured a full slate of college football games but no NFL contests. Two operators, DraftKings and Underdog each saw triple-digit growth, delivering weekly increases of 125% and 119%, respectively. Three others, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Novig, saw gains of at least 30%, led by Polymarket with a weekly increase of 46%.

One interesting nugget surrounds weekend figures at Kalshi, where volume on Sunday only surpassed prior daily activity by $34 million, BofA data shows. Typically, Sunday volume for the quarter dwarfs that of College Football Saturdays due to the voracious demand for NFL offerings. BofA analyst Shaun Kelley attributes the irregularity to the possibility that Kalshi is “over indexing” on college sports.

Kelley also cited improvements at Robinhood as a possible factor for the regression at Kalshi. Just before the NFL season, Robinhood took a minority stake in Crypto.com and struck a deal to begin routing NFL contracts to OG.com, the site’s regulated prediction market platform.

About Disco Beats

In March, Polymarket opened The Situation Room, a pop-up “newsbar” in Washington, DC. The bar and lounge’s televisions played various content related to prediction markets, like Bloomberg Terminals, cable news, and live social media feeds that were “dedicated to monitoring the situation.”

A month earlier, Polymarket opened a free grocery store in New York City. The promotion ran Feb. 12-16, with shoppers allowed to gather up to $50 per person in free groceries.   

More recently, Polymarket has paid top dollar for prominent athletes and celebrities to promote its prediction market. The company’s paid partners include LeBron James, Derek Jeter, Eli Manning, Spike Lee, and Craig Robinson.