WEEX Labs: Is the Super Bull Market Cycle Coming?

Source: WEEK

In the current bearish market sentiment, Prediction Markets have become a "safe haven for information" — traders are tired of the volatility brought on by selling pressure and are more eager to bet on event-driven certainty. Prediction Markets are taking over from Memes as a hot area for monetizing attention economics.

Prediction Markets: A Storm of Attention in a Downturn Market

The crypto market is currently in a downturn, and Prediction Markets, along with ZK and Perp DEX, are the few bright spots, with their common characteristic being a bet on the future narrative of crypto.

In particular, Prediction Markets are fueling a trillion-dollar narrative: in the past week, the total market nominal trading volume surged to $3.5 billion, weekly active users exceeded 290,000, and the open interest even approached the peak of $900 million from last year's bet on the U.S. election.

Figure 1 Source: https://dune.com/datadashboards/prediction-markets

This is no coincidence.

During the 2024 U.S. election, Polymarket's prediction accuracy far outperformed polls, with transaction volume skyrocketing from $62 million in May of that year to $2.1 billion in October — a growth of over 32 times. Even after the election, the momentum did not wane: on the Nobel Peace Prize announcement day, a single market traded over $21.40 million.

Compliance + Capital Driving Narrative Upgrade

The resurgence of Prediction Markets is once again driven by an influx of capital under relaxed regulations, propelling a narrative upgrade.

• Relaxed Regulations: Against the backdrop of the Trump administration's crypto-friendly policies, negative regulation is shifting towards cautious openness. The CFTC dropped its appeal against the prediction platform Kalshi's political event contracts, Polymarket was approved to operate as an intermediary market, and Kalshi claimed "legal betting in 50 states" under CFTC regulation.

• Capital Influx: ICE invested $2 billion in Polymarket, setting a record for the largest amount in crypto financing history, pushing the valuation to $9 billion; Kalshi recently raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation; Solana, BNB Chain, and others have also started supporting prediction products on their respective blockchains.

• Narrative Escalation: Predicting the market's narrative shift, which has brought more user engagement and dissemination. As Multicoin Capital's investment partner Eli Qiang mentioned, in addition to cash flow assets (such as stocks, bonds) and supply-demand assets (such as commodities, forex), the crypto prediction market has spawned "assets measured by attention," rather than binary options or gambling.

Figure 2 Source: https://news.kalshi.com/p/nationwide-poll-shows-broad-support-for-prediction-markets

Key Players to Watch

The landscape has begun to take shape, and due to space constraints, WEEX Labs will discuss several key platforms here.

Figure 3 Source: https://x.com/dylangbane/status/1969129269940142528

• @Polymarket—Polymarket is a veteran-level prediction platform founded in 2020, with total funding exceeding $2.2 billion, leading political and economic event markets. Polymarket supports USDC settlement and operates on the Polygon chain, with over 1.5 million users.

• @Kalshi—Kalshi emphasizes KYC and institutional-grade liquidity as a US-compliant prediction market founded in 2018, focusing on sports and macro events, integrated with Robinhood. If Polymarket is seen as similar to Tether, then Kalshi is more like Circle, but Kalshi's market share has begun to exceed Polymarket.

• @opinionlabsxyz—Opinion is an emerging prediction platform supported by YZi Labs, focusing on Eastern narratives such as celebrity trends, with current market share hovering in the top three.

• @trylimitless——Limitless is a high-frequency short-cycle forecasting platform, founded in 2023, with a total financing of $18M, operating on the Base and Arbitrum chains.

• @MyriadMarkets——Myriad is a social embedded platform based on Abstract L2, positioned as a low-threshold social prediction tool covering a diverse range of event topics.

• @soraoracle——In contrast to the user-facing prediction protocols mentioned above, Sora focuses on a developer-oriented oracle service, being the first multimodal AI agent oracle project for prediction markets on the BNB Chain. The protocol's governance token $SORA is also listed on the WEEX trading platform.

Summary

Prediction markets are not about gambling luck or trading memes, but about the collective intelligence's judgment and game theory on event pricing.

With Polymarket hinting at the launch of a token next year, the prediction market may usher in a wave of wealth creation through information asymmetry and insight monetization. We await eagerly.

This article is a contribution and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.