Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

Prediction markets, financial tools that utilize collective intelligence to forecast future events, experienced unprecedented explosive growth from 2024 to 2025.

Platforms represented by Polymarket and Kalshi have repeatedly surpassed daily trading volumes of $100 million, with cumulative trading volumes reaching hundreds of billions of dollars, marking a key turning point for prediction markets from niche tools to mainstream financial markets.

However, beneath the surface of prosperity, there are undercurrents. The mid-tier markets of leading platforms and the vast majority of emerging platforms are all plagued by the common issue of insufficient liquidity; regulatory uncertainty looms like the "Sword of Damocles," always a core risk for industry development; at the same time, emerging platforms are actively exploring differentiated breakout paths amid fierce competition. Based on this, this article will provide a comprehensive review and analysis of the core platforms in the Web3 prediction market.

Leading Platforms: Duopoly Pattern

Polymarket

Network: Polygon

Is there a token? No native token yet, but according to sources cited by Decrypt, Polymarket plans to issue a crypto token after re-entering the U.S. market, which may not happen until 2026.

Market Size: As of mid-October, Polymarket's cumulative trading volume surpassed $20 billion, with daily trading volumes reaching tens of millions to over $100 million, and total users exceeding 1.4 million. This year, Polymarket's market share has been impacted, with Kalshi catching up and even surpassing it.

Core Features:

• No KYC required, supports deposits via multiple tokens across networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, as well as bank cards and PayPal.
• Settles only in USDC through smart contracts.
• Uses an order book model.
• Polymarket does not charge trading fees.
• A wide variety of markets, with political and cryptocurrency sectors dominating, and other popular sectors including sports, Trump, culture, and economics.
• Uses UMA protocol's Optimistic Oracle for result verification. The newly launched 15-minute crypto asset up/down prediction market is supported by Chainlink oracles.
• Offers USDC liquidity incentives and holding rewards.
• Relatively sufficient liquidity, making it one of the largest decentralized prediction markets by trading volume.
• Large user base and high market activity, facilitating information discovery and truth trading.

Key Developments in the Past Six Months:

• In June, Polymarket integrated Grok analysis and X post citations into its prediction market.
• In July, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded its investigation into Polymarket. Subsequently, according to multiple sources cited by Bloomberg, Polymarket spent $112 million to acquire the small exchange QCX, making its return to the U.S. market.
• In August, Polymarket secured tens of millions of dollars in investment from the venture capital fund of Donald Trump Jr. He will also join Polymarket's advisory board.
• In September, Polymarket received CFTC approval to launch in the U.S.
• In early October, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, made a strategic investment of $2 billion in Polymarket, with a post-investment valuation of $9 billion. Additionally, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan disclosed two previously unannounced funding rounds—$150 million led by Founders Fund completed earlier this year and $55 million led by Blockchain Capital completed before last year's election.
• As of mid-October, Polymarket's cumulative trading volume surpassed $20 billion.

Shortcomings:

• Initially restricted U.S. user access due to regulatory issues, but is about to reopen to U.S. users.
• Relies on the UMA protocol for dispute resolution, which may lead to delays in result verification.
• Insufficient depth in mid-tier 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 that of Polymarket.

Is there a token? No

Market Size: As of October 19, Kalshi's open interest reached $250 million, higher than Polymarket ($215 million), with a cumulative nominal trading volume of $12.2 billion.

Features:

• Compliant, mandatory KYC, currently only open to U.S. users.
• Supports debit cards, wire transfers, and bank transfers, as well as deposits in USDC and SOL through Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
• Settles in fiat USD (if deposited in cryptocurrency, converted to fiat by Zero Hash).
• Uses an order book model.
• Offers liquidity incentives and trading volume incentive programs.
• Introduced an interest accumulation plan for cash and open positions, with the current API set at 3.75%. This rate is variable and may be adjusted at any time.
• Dynamic fee mechanism, details can be found here.
• In mid-October, Kalshi partnered with oracle project Pyth Network to put real-time, regulated prediction market data on-chain.
• A wide variety of markets, with sports and politics dominating, and other popular categories including economics, crypto, entertainment, and elections.

Shortcomings:

• U.S. compliance is an advantage but also means limited flexibility, such as KYC requirements (which have pros and cons) and geographic restrictions.
• Due to regulatory constraints, certain types of markets cannot be established.
• The platform charges trading fees.
• Community user feedback indicates significant price spreads.
• Lack of depth in mid and tail markets, which is a pain point for all prediction markets.

Important Developments in the Past Six Months

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

Emerging Prediction Markets

Launched Mainnet / Alpha / Beta Version:

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 onto the BNB Chain.

Market Size: As of mid-October, Limitless's cumulative trading volume reached $511 million, although far less than Polymarket and Kalshi, it ranks among the top in emerging prediction markets.

Token: The Limitless token LMTS was launched on October 22, with a current FDV of $300 million. In terms of token economics, 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, and 24.37% for ecosystem rewards (all unlocked at TGE in the first quarter), with 10% each for treasury and liquidity.

Token Utility:

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

In the first two days after the token launch, on October 22, 2025, Limitless completed a $10 million seed round led by 1confirmation, bringing total funding to $18 million.

Features:

• Supports deposits via USDC through Coinbase or the Base network.
• Uses an order book model.
• Focuses on cryptocurrency and stock price predictions, providing market forecasts every 30 minutes, hourly, daily, and weekly.
• Unique trading mechanism: supports splitting and merging of shares, where $1 can be split into 1 "Yes" and 1 "No" share, and vice versa, providing traders with a seamless buy/sell experience across Yes/No assets, with high trading flexibility.
• Negrisk classification market: a special multi-outcome prediction market where only one outcome can win, and all "No" contracts are interrelated, allowing "No" shares to convert to "Yes" shares for other outcomes, enabling quick position changes.
• Most markets are parsed by Pyth Network.
• Fee structure: for AMM markets, all trades incur a fixed fee of 0.25%. 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).

Shortcomings / Risks:

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

Opinion

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

Opinion is currently in the beta testing phase and requires an invitation code for access. In mid-October, Opinion Labs announced the official launch of the new brand "Opinion." The Opinion mainnet will focus on the theme of "macroeconomic prediction infrastructure" while retaining general prediction markets such as news and sports. Users will be able to trade indicators such as CPI, interest rates, and employment to hedge against macroeconomic risks.

On October 23, Opinion launched on the BNB Chain and will introduce the OPN trading points system, creating the first macroeconomic and comprehensive prediction market in the BNB Chain ecosystem. Additionally, Opinion will open AI-driven permissionless market creation and oracle functions after the mainnet launch, aiming to combine its AI oracle, prediction market, and liquidity infrastructure—Opinion Metapool and Opinion Protocol—to build a macroeconomic prediction ecosystem.

Melee

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

Features:

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

PMX

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

Features:

• Anyone can create a prediction market, similar to issuing tokens on a joint curve, but using a presale model, requiring a fundraising target (ranging from $1,000 to $20,000) and clear market resolution standards.
• PMX converts each prediction market into two tokens: "YES" and "NO" tokens are minted and added to the liquidity pool. Prices are rebalanced through an arbitrage wallet, ensuring the total price of the two tokens equals $1.
• Uses an AMM model (in collaboration with Meteora), allowing anyone to provide liquidity.
• Prediction markets on PMX can be traded on major Solana DEXs (including Raydium, Orca, Meteora, etc.).
• In terms of fees, each transaction incurs a 1% fee, with 40% proportionally distributed to LPs, 10% to market creators, and 50% to PMX.
• Market resolution is currently conducted internally, with plans for automation through AI agents in the future.

Manifold

Manifold is a social prediction market that gamifies predictions to make them fun and easy to participate in. 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 and automated market makers. Trades are first executed based on limit orders, then based on automated market makers.
• The platform uses Mana (Ṁ) virtual currency/game currency 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, and can also be purchased, but cannot be cashed out, which may reduce some users' motivation to participate. New users receive a starting fund of 1,000 M for free.
• A key component of the multi-chain protocol Myriad Protocol is built on EigenCloud.

Shortcomings:

• The inability to cash out may reduce some users' motivation to participate.
• Relies on creator integrity, as market resolution is determined by the creator (in special cases, the admin team may overturn resolved issues). While this grants creators significant autonomy, it may pose risks of subjective judgment and potential disputes.
• Liquidity issues.

Projects Worth Watching That Are Not Yet Launched

The Clearing Company

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

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

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

pvpfun

The smart infrastructure pvpfun is set to launch the AI-driven prediction DApp "FUN Predict" on the Mantle network, which will combine high throughput and modular design to achieve real-time settlement and scalable market creation. FUN Predict will be built on Pvpfun's Vibe Coding AI framework, enabling 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 and has since transformed into a sports prediction market.

Which companies/projects are expanding into the prediction market space?

Robinhood

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

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

Jupiter

Jupiter launched a beta version of its prediction market in October 2025, with liquidity provided by Kalshi.

MetaMask

On October 14, MetaMask announced that it will soon integrate the Polymarket prediction market within its wallet.

Bitget Wallet

Bitget Wallet announced on October 23 that it will integrate the Limitless prediction market.

World

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

Rabby

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

Drift Protocol

Drift Protocol launched the prediction market BET in August 2024, but there have been no further updates or promotions from the official team 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 the native interface of Polymarket, it adds advanced filters to help users better sift through markets and supports advanced order types (trailing stop-loss, automatic take-profit and stop-loss, and other professional tools).

Established Web3 Prediction Platforms

Augur

Augur officially launched in July 2018, but had already 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 and stated that the Lituus Foundation is revitalizing Augur and exploring a new direction: separating oracles from the underlying prediction market, making Augur a modular, neutral source of truth that can connect to any prediction market, price information, DAO, game, insurance protocol, etc.

At the same time, Augur's oracles will have cross-chain capabilities, with queries coming from any chain that supports cross-chain messaging. Parsing and settlement will still be retained on Ethereum Layer-1 to maintain the economic integrity of the oracles.

Further Reading: "Fun Fact: The First DApp on Ethereum Was a Prediction Market"

Azuro

Azuro claims to be a decentralized protocol for prediction markets, focusing on sports predictions and providing tools and infrastructure for EVM chains. Some prediction markets are built on it.

Summary

Web3 prediction markets are in a phase of rapid development, with a solid duopoly pattern among leading platforms, while emerging platforms and cross-industry players are further enriching the prediction market ecosystem.

With regulatory clarity and ecosystem integration, prediction markets are expected to play a greater role in financial information aggregation, risk hedging, and other areas. However, users should be cautious and rationally assess the core value of prediction markets, manage risks effectively, and evaluate event probabilities judiciously.

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