Forkast is winding down its prediction market platform, closing one of the few trading venues built specifically for esports as trading in the category concentrates on Kalshi and Polymarket.
According to the company’s Oct. 12 announcement on X, withdrawals remain available until 11:59 p.m. UTC on Nov. 9. Automated agent trading pauses on Oct. 15, and markets scheduled to conclude after Nov. 9 will be canceled and refunded. A banner on the Forkast website tells users to withdraw their balances before that date.
The timing cuts across the biggest event on Forkast’s calendar. The 2026 League of Legends World Championship begins on Oct. 15, the day agent trading stops, and its final is scheduled for Nov. 14 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, five days after the platform closes. Outright markets on the tournament winner will therefore be refunded rather than resolved.
Forkast did not give a reason for the closure. The company said it processed more than $100 million in volume across 1.6 million trades, with more than 10,000 registered traders and more than 1,000 trading agents deployed. Those figures are the company’s own and have not been independently verified.
The shutdown ends a short and repeatedly reworked run.
Forkast was built by Community Gaming, the New York-based esports tournament platform that, as previously reported by The Esports Advocate, laid off approximately 17 employees in 2023. At that time the company had raised $18.5 million from investors including BITKRAFT Ventures, Binance Labs, Animoca Brands and Griffin Gaming Partners. Forkast launched on the Ronin blockchain in early 2025, with staking rewards built around its CGX token.
That model did not last a year. In November 2025, Forkast announced its migration to Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer-2 network, alongside a strategic investment from Arbitrum Gaming Ventures whose size was not disclosed. “Prediction markets live or die by speed and liquidity,” Forkast CEO Chris Gonsalves said in the announcement. BlockchainGamer reported that Forkast dropped support for CGX as part of the move and burned the token’s supply after its price collapsed following launch.
For most of its time on Arbitrum, Forkast charged nothing. According to the platform’s fee documentation, it ran a platform-wide zero-fee promotion from December 2025 through July 2026. Its standard schedule is a 0.5% fee on sell orders that match an existing order and 0.25% on withdrawals. Fee-paying trading therefore ran for about two and a half months before the shutdown notice.
The platform also sought deals within the esports business. As previously reported by The Esports Advocate, data provider GRID signed a partnership in February to feed live match data into Forkast’s markets.
The strategy was to find users the larger platforms were not reaching. In February, Gonsalves told Esports.net that the US prediction market was “starting to get saturated” and that Forkast would target esports fans outside the US, citing team members on the ground in Brazil and Argentina.
The two countries Gonsalves named moved against prediction markets within weeks. In March, a Buenos Aires court ordered Argentina’s telecom regulator to block Polymarket nationwide over unauthorized gambling. In April, Brazil’s National Monetary Council banned event contracts tied to sports, politics and entertainment, including from foreign platforms serving Brazilians, and the Finance Ministry ordered 27 prediction platforms blocked, Polymarket and Kalshi among them. Forkast was not on that list. By July, however, Forkast’s terms of service stated that the company “does not conduct on-the-ground marketing or solicitation in Brazil or Argentina” and that the platform “is not directed to persons located in Brazil, Argentina.”
Brazil then went further. A Sept. 25 provisional decree banned online betting outright, with sites ordered offline by Oct. 6. Forkast’s shutdown notice, six days later, did not mention either country, though it said the company was proud “to have helped bring prediction markets to esports fans in emerging markets.”
The market Forkast was competing in had grown well beyond it.
Esports Insider reported in August that users traded more than $1.2 billion on esports on Polymarket in the year to July 30, slightly more than the $1 billion traded on Kalshi. Kalshi users traded more than $344 million on esports in the 30 days before that report, up from $113 million in April, with League of Legends and Counter-Strike 2 accounting for most of the activity. Forkast’s lifetime figure, accumulated over about 20 months, is smaller than Kalshi’s reported volume for that single 30-day period.
Activity on Forkast itself was thin by comparison. On Oct. 13, a day after the announcement, the esports match markets featured on the Forkast homepage each showed between $32 and $605 in trading volume. Its highest-volume market, on the winner of the 2026 LCK, showed $4.5 million.
Still unknown are the reason for the closure, whether the Brazilian and Argentine crackdowns played a role, whether Community Gaming continues to operate beyond Forkast and what happens to its staff, the size of the Arbitrum Gaming Ventures investment, how much of the reported $100 million came from automated agents and incentive programs, and what happens to the GRID data agreement.
Forkast’s exit leaves esports prediction trading concentrated in Kalshi and Polymarket.
The key question facing publishers, teams, and data providers is whether a specialized prediction market for games can maintain its liquidity once mainstream exchanges start listing the same matchups.