Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

On September 24, 2025, the decentralized prediction market platform Melee announced the completion of a $3.5 million seed round financing, led by Variant, with participation from DBA and several angel investors, including CoinShares Chief Strategy Officer Meltem Demirors, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Web3 investor Santiago Roel Santos.

Founded in 2025, Melee is a prediction market based on Solana, currently in an open waitlist phase. Its founding team includes ZenLlama, Maximilian, and Kai, with Maximilian having previously served as the strategic head of Ava Labs and Chief Strategy Officer of NodeKit, and having created popular brands like Dokis on TikTok; Kai has extensive software development experience at Microsoft and Amazon. Additionally, Melee's management team includes a core systems engineer from Solana/Monad's developer relations head, as well as quantitative traders from Invesco and SIG/NodeKit founders.

Variant founder Jesse Walden views prediction markets as an emerging market similar to social networks that is "not winner-takes-all," believing that Melee's creator-driven model has the potential to break through. He also stated that for creators, Melee offers something that other speculative tools have historically lacked: a sustainable way to monetize influence without bearing reputational risk.

According to Variant's publication, Melee's main features are as follows:

First, a permissionless market creation mechanism. The platform leverages Solana's high throughput and low costs, allowing any user to create fact- or opinion-based prediction markets in areas such as politics, pop culture, sports, or technology trends without centralized approval.

Second, deep integration with the creator economy. The platform allows media creators to combine their content with markets, such as predicting movie box office results or esports outcomes, and earn up to 20% of transaction fees. This model is similar to the meme coin issuance of Pump.fun, aiming for viral growth through social media, with a built-in one-click sharing feature to X or Discord further amplifying the effect, targeting a young, crypto-native audience.

Third, positioned as an internet-native belief valuation platform, Melee reflects public sentiment through market data, which can be used for brand analysis of product expectations or political institutions assessing policy responses, with plans to launch an API to explore B2B revenue in the future.

In terms of pricing mechanism, Melee rewards early accurate predictors through algorithms, ensuring that market prices reflect true belief valuations rather than blind following. Additionally, the platform allows unlimited trading scales, which will attract high-risk speculators.

From a market perspective, the cumulative trading volume of prediction markets in 2025 has exceeded $17.5 billion, dominated by Polymarket and Kalshi, while new projects like Myriad and Opinion Labs are growing rapidly. In terms of financing, compared to the recent $15 million financing of The Clearing Company, Melee's $3.5 million scale is relatively small, reflecting that its technology and market expansion capabilities are still in the early stages.

In terms of competitive landscape segmentation, Myriad (creator-embedded markets), Opinion Labs (Monad chain permissionless market), and fireplace (socialized Polymarket information flow) are similar to Melee in terms of openness and socialization. Melee's innovation lies in its "viral market" model, which theoretically has certain rapid user acquisition potential, but balancing an entertaining market with credible data output remains a key challenge.

Overall, Melee offers a novel attempt, and how it establishes itself in the multi-billion dollar prediction market in the future still needs to be validated through its actual progress.

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