Prediction Market Landscape: The Battle Between Two Titans—How Can New Entrants Disrupt the Status Quo?

Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi have repeatedly surpassed $100 million in daily trading volume, with cumulative volumes reaching tens of billions of dollars, marking a critical turning point as prediction markets evolve from niche tools into mainstream financial markets.

However, beneath the prosperous appearance, challenges lurk. Mid-tier markets on leading platforms and most emerging platforms struggle with insufficient liquidity; regulatory uncertainty constantly threatens the industry; meanwhile, emerging platforms actively explore differentiated strategies amid fierce competition. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of core platforms in the Web3 prediction market landscape.

Leading Platforms: Duopoly Structure

Polymarket

Network: Polygon

Token status: Currently no native token, though according to Decrypt citing sources, Polymarket plans to issue a cryptocurrency token after re-entering the U.S. market, possibly not until 2026.

Market size: As of mid-October, Polymarket's cumulative trading volume exceeded $20 billion, with daily trading volumes reaching tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and total users exceeding 1.4 million. This year, Polymarket's market share has been challenged, with Kalshi catching up and even surpassing it.

Core features:

• No KYC required, supports deposits via multiple tokens across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and other networks, as well as bank cards and PayPal.
• Uses only USDC for smart contract settlement.
• Employs an order book model.
• Polymarket charges no transaction fees.
• Rich market variety, ranked by current open positions, politics and cryptocurrency sectors dominate, with other popular sectors including sports, Trump, culture, and economics.
• Uses UMA protocol's Optimistic Oracle for result verification. For newly launched 15-minute cryptocurrency up/down prediction markets, Chainlink oracles provide support.
• Offers USDC liquidity incentives and holding rewards.
• Relatively abundant liquidity, one of the highest-volume decentralized prediction markets currently.
• Large user base with high market activity, more conducive to information discovery and truth trading.

Key developments in the past six months:

• June: Polymarket integrated Grok analysis and X post references into its prediction markets.
• July: U.S. Department of Justice concluded its investigation into Polymarket. Later, Bloomberg reported citing multiple sources that Polymarket spent $112 million to acquire small exchange QCX to re-enter the U.S. market.
• August: Polymarket received tens of millions of dollars in investment from Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital fund. Donald Trump Jr. will also join Polymarket's advisory board.
• September: The CFTC approved Polymarket to launch in the United States.
• Early October: Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, made a $2 billion strategic investment in Polymarket, valuing it at $9 billion post-investment. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan also disclosed two previously unannounced funding rounds — $150 million led by Founders Fund earlier this year and $55 million led by Blockchain Capital before last year's election.
• As of mid-October, Polymarket's trading volume surpassed $20 billion cumulatively.

Limitations:

• Previously restricted U.S. user access due to regulatory issues, though it will soon reopen to U.S. users.
• Relies on UMA protocol for dispute resolution, which may involve result verification delays and other issues.
• Insufficient depth in mid-to-tail markets, a common pain point across the industry.

Kalshi

Kalshi is an event contract exchange regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where users trade on the outcomes of real-world events. Since 2025, Kalshi's growth momentum has surpassed Polymarket.

Token status: None

Market size: As of October 19, Kalshi's open interest reached $250 million, higher than Polymarket's $215 million, with cumulative notional trading volume reaching $12.2 billion.

Features:

• Compliant, mandatory KYC, currently open only to U.S. users.
• Supports debit cards, wire transfers, bank transfers, and deposits of USDC, SOL and other tokens through Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
• Settles in fiat USD (if deposited with cryptocurrency, converted to fiat by Zero Hash).
• Employs an order book model.
• Provides liquidity incentives and volume incentive programs.
• Offers interest accrual programs for cash and open positions, currently set at 3.75% APY. This rate is floating and may be adjusted at any time.
• Dynamic fee mechanism, details available here.
• Mid-October: Kalshi partnered with oracle project Pyth Network to put real-time, regulated prediction market data on-chain.
• Rich market variety, ranked by current open interest, sports and politics dominate, with other popular versions including economics, crypto, entertainment, and elections.

Limitations:

• U.S. compliance is an advantage but also means limited flexibility, such as KYC requirements (pros and cons) and geographical restrictions.
• Due to regulatory restrictions, certain types of markets cannot be established.
• Platform charges transaction fees.
• Community users report relatively large spreads.
• Lack of depth in mid and tail markets, though this is a pain point for all prediction markets.

Important developments in the past six months:

• May 2025: Kalshi Inc. hired Donald Trump Jr. as a strategic advisor and is working with Musk's xAI.
• June 2025: Kalshi completed $185 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation, led by Paradigm.
• June 2025: U.S. online investment platform Webull introduced hourly cryptocurrency contract trading to retail investors through Kalshi.
• July 2025: xAI will integrate its Grok conversation model into the Kalshi prediction market.
• Early October 2025: Kalshi's cryptocurrency head John Wang stated that the prediction market platform Kalshi will be available on "every major cryptocurrency application and exchange" within the next 12 months.
• October 2025: Kalshi completed $300 million in funding, valuing the company at $5 billion. Additionally, the company plans to announce it will begin accepting bets from customers in more than 140 countries.

Emerging Prediction Markets

Already launched on mainnet/Alpha/beta:

Limitless:

Limitless is a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Base network, the largest prediction market in the Base ecosystem, which decided in October 2025 to expand to BNB Chain.

Market size: As of mid-October, Limitless's cumulative trading volume was $511 million, far less than Polymarket and Kalshi, but among the top emerging prediction markets.

Token: The Limitless token LMTS launched on October 22, currently with a $300 million FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation). For tokenomics, the total supply is 1 billion tokens, with 25% allocated to investors, 1.37% to Kaito presale, 1.26% to Echo round, 25% to the team, ecosystem rewards (airdrops and incentives) accounting for 24.37% (first season airdrop fully unlocked at TGE (Token Generation Event)), and 10% each for treasury and liquidity.

Token utility:

• Staking tokens unlocks fee discounts.
• Tokens are directly integrated into platform challenges, rewards, and incentive programs.
• A portion of platform fees will be used to buy back tokens.

Two days before Limitless token launch, on October 22, 2025, the platform completed a $10 million seed round led by 1confirmation, bringing total funding to $18 million.

Features:

• Supports deposits via Coinbase or Base network USDC.
• Employs an order book model.
• Focuses on cryptocurrency and stock price predictions, offering 30-minute, hourly, daily, and weekly market forecasts.
• Unique trading mechanism: Supports share splitting and merging, $1 can be split into 1 "Yes" share and 1 "No" share, and conversely, both can be merged back to $1, providing traders with seamless buy/sell experience across Yes/No assets with high trading flexibility.
• Negrisk categorical markets: A special multi-outcome prediction market where only one outcome can win, all "No" contracts for outcomes are interconnected, supporting conversion of "No" shares to other outcomes' "Yes" shares, enabling quick position switching.
• Most markets are resolved by Pyth Network.
• Fees: For AMM markets, all trades incur a fixed 0.25% fee. In order book markets, fees are charged only to takers, ranging from 0.03% to 3%, with lower fees for lower risk and higher fees for higher returns.
• Incentives: LP rewards, points system (future airdrops).

Limitations/Risks:

• Liquidity and market risks.
• High complexity of features: Share splitting/merging, Negrisk market share conversion, and other mechanisms have a learning curve for new users, requiring understanding of underlying logic for efficient use.
• Regulatory uncertainty.

Opinion

Opinion is one of the projects selected for the Yzi Labs 7th season MVB Accelerator Program in 2024, and later received investment from Yzi Labs. In March 2025, Opinion Labs announced the completion of a $5 million seed round led by Yzi Labs, with other investors including angel investment community Echo, Animoca Ventures, Manifold Trading, Amber Group, and others.

Opinion is currently in beta, requiring an invitation code for access. In mid-October, Opinion Labs announced the official launch of the new brand "Opinion." While retaining general prediction markets like news and sports, Opinion's mainnet will initially focus on "macroeconomic prediction infrastructure," allowing users to trade on CPI, interest rates, employment indicators from various regions to hedge macroeconomic risks.

Opinion launched on BNB Chain on October 23 and will introduce the OPN trading points system, building BNB Chain ecosystem's first macroeconomic and comprehensive prediction market. Opinion will also open AI-driven permissionless market creation and oracle functions after mainnet launch, committed to building a macroeconomic prediction ecosystem by combining its AI oracle, prediction markets, and liquidity infrastructure Opinion Metapool and Opinion Protocol.

Melee

Melee is a Solana ecosystem prediction market that completed a $3.5 million Pre-Seed round in September 2025, with participation from Variant, DBA, and others. On October 21, Melee launched its Alpha version.

Features:

• Melee self-describes as a combination of Pumpfun and Polymarket, where anyone can create prediction markets for any event.
• Melee also supports users betting on overall market growth through the Melee All feature, allowing investment in all outcomes within a market.
• Creators can also profit through their audience.
• Unlike most prediction markets, Melee's outcome pricing follows a bonding curve, allowing speculators to profit by making correct predictions early.

PMX

PMX, formerly the Polymarket Telegram trading bot Polycule, has recently developed into a Solana permissionless prediction market launchpad powered by Meteora. The Polycule team previously received $560,000 in investment from Alliance DAO. The token PCULE has been renamed PMX, currently with a market cap of $16 million.

Features:

• Anyone can create prediction markets, similar to issuing tokens on a bonding curve, but using a presale model requiring a fundraising target ($1,000 to $20,000) and clear market resolution standards.
• PMX transforms each prediction market into two tokens: "YES" and "NO" tokens are minted and added to liquidity pools. Through arbitrage wallets rebalancing prices, the sum of both token prices reaches $1.
• Uses AMM model (in partnership with Meteora), allowing anyone to provide liquidity.
• Prediction markets on PMX can be traded on major Solana DEXs (including Raydium, Orca, Meteora, etc.).
• For fees, each transaction generates a 1% fee, with 40% distributed proportionally to LPs, 10% to market creators, and 50% to PMX.
• Market resolution is currently handled internally, with future automation planned through AI agents.

Manifold

Manifold is a social prediction market making predictions fun and easy to participate in through gamification. In March, Manifold announced plans to release the MYR token this year, which will also be adopted by Decrypt, Rug Radio, Lucky Trader, and DegenzNFT.

Features:

• Anyone can create prediction markets for free.
• Manifold combines limit orders with an automated market maker. Trades are executed first against limit orders, then against the automated market maker.
• The platform uses Mana (Ṁ) virtual currency/game coins for users to bet on markets. Mana can be earned through correct predictions, successful trades, creating popular markets, completing tasks, referring friends, or completing bounties, or it can be purchased, but cannot be cashed out, which may reduce participation motivation for some users. New users receive 1000 M starting funds for free.
• Key components of the multi-chain Myriad Protocol are built on EigenCloud.

Limitations:

• The inability to cash out may reduce participation motivation for some users.
• Reliance on creator integrity, with market resolution decided by creators (in special cases, the admin team will overturn resolved issues). While giving creators significant autonomy, this may risk subjective judgment and potential disputes.
• Liquidity issues.

Projects worth watching that haven't launched yet:

The Clearing Company

The Clearing Company is a prediction market created by former team members of The Clearing Company, on-chain, permissionless, and regulated, which will support trading predictions in crypto, politics, sports, culture, and more.

The Clearing Company founder and CEO Toni Gemayel previously worked at Polymarket, Kalshi, and Figma. According to the official website, besides the CEO, the company has at least 4 engineering and product team members from Polymarket.

The Clearing Company completed a $15 million seed round in August 2025, led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Haun Ventures, Variant, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

pvpfun

Smart infrastructure pvpfun is about to launch the AI-driven prediction DApp "FUN Predict" on the Mantle network. FUN Predict will combine high throughput and modular design for real-time settlement and scalable market creation. FUN Predict will be built on Pvpfun's Vibe Coding AI framework, allowing anyone to create programmable, evolving social financial products.

According to the official Twitter profile, the team behind pvpfun is Gametaverse, with supporters including OKX Ventures, Animoca Brands, Dragonfly, and others.

Overtime

Overtime was formerly the options protocol Thales, later pivoting to sports prediction markets.

Which Companies/Projects Are Expanding into Prediction Markets?

Robinhood

Robinhood announced a partnership with Kalshi in March this year to launch a prediction market hub. The professional and college football prediction market event contracts launched by Robinhood in August and over 100 prediction market contracts added in October (including tariffs, federal policy, spending cuts, etc.) are provided by Robinhood Derivatives, LLC through KalshiEX LLC.

During this year's Token 2049 summit, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev told Bloomberg that prediction markets have enormous potential and have become one of the company's nine major business lines with annual revenue exceeding $100 million.

Jupiter

Jupiter launched a prediction market beta version in October 2025, with Kalshi providing liquidity.

MetaMask

On October 14, MetaMask announced upcoming integration of Polymarket prediction markets within the wallet.

Bitget Wallet

Bitget Wallet announced integration with Limitless prediction markets on October 23.

World

In May 2025, World, co-founded by Sam Altman, launched prediction markets, supporting direct participation in prediction markets from the World App through the Kalshi Mini App. In October, the Polymarket Mini App also launched on World.

Rabby

Web3 wallet Rabby announced on October 22 that it will integrate Polymarket within the wallet.

Drift Protocol

Drift Protocol launched the prediction market BET in August 2024, but the official team has not made further updates or promotions in recent months, and there are no active prediction markets on the official prediction platform.

Prediction Market Aggregators

TradeFox

TradeFox is a prediction market aggregator and broker supported by Alliance DAO and CMT Digital, fully integrated with Polymarket and soon to integrate Kalshi, Limitless, Myriad, and other prediction markets.

Features: Compared to Polymarket's native interface, it adds advanced filters to help better screen markets and supports advanced order types (trailing stop-loss, automatic take-profit/stop-loss, and other professional tools).

Established Web3 Prediction Platforms

Augur

Augur officially launched in July 2018, but had raised over $5 million through an ICO three years prior. Augur's official Twitter account did not post any updates from November 2021 to March 2025, when it announced its return, stating that the Lituus Foundation is revitalizing Augur and exploring a new direction: separating the oracle from the underlying prediction market, making Augur a modular, neutral source of truth—connectable to any prediction market, price information, DAO, game, insurance protocol, etc.

Additionally, Augur's oracle will be cross-chain, with queries able to come from any chain supporting cross-chain messaging. Augur will keep resolution and settlement on Ethereum Layer-1, maintaining the oracle's economic integrity.

Azuro

Azuro self-describes as a decentralized protocol for prediction markets, focusing on sports predictions, providing tools and infrastructure for EVM chains. Some prediction markets are built on it.

Summary

Web3 prediction markets are in a rapid development phase, with a stable "duopoly" structure at the top and new platforms and cross-industry players further enriching the prediction market ecosystem.

With clearer regulation and ecosystem integration, prediction markets are poised to play a greater role in financial information aggregation, risk hedging, and other areas. However, users should be cautious to view prediction markets' core value rationally, practice good risk management, and evaluate event probabilities sensibly.

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