Written by: Jerry
"A certain prediction market, in order to expand its Chinese region, has already opened fixed salary offers of up to $150,000 a year."
This is a recent revelation from Twitter KOL AB Kuai.Dong. Although there is no clear source, it is enough to illustrate one fact: prediction markets have become one of the hottest tracks in the crypto space for 2025.
An even more important signal is that top platforms like Binance have officially entered the arena.
In March 2024, Binance launched the Futures NEXT platform to test the prediction mechanism; in 2025, Opinion Labs, incubated by YZiLabs, achieved a trading volume of $6.4 billion within 50 days (reported by BitcoinWorld), and Binance co-founder Zhao Changpeng (CZ) publicly expressed support.
At the same time, Robinhood has reached an annual revenue of $100-300 million through its partnership with Kalshi; Coinbase has also announced plans to launch a prediction market supported by Kalshi.
A consensus is forming: early next year, the next battleground for exchanges will be the prediction market.
Why do Binance, Coinbase, and Robinhood see the prediction market as a must-win territory? How profitable is this seemingly niche track?
01 After the Trump election, the prediction market is heating up instead of cooling down
According to common sense, after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the prediction market should enter a recession period.
But the reality is quite the opposite.
According to DuneAnalytics and Keyrock's 2025 annual report, by the end of 2025, the global weekly trading volume of prediction markets will exceed $2.34 billion. Monthly active users surged from 4,000 at the beginning of 2024 to over 600,000 today, an increase of 14,900%. The cumulative open contracts skyrocketed from $50 million to $608 million, an 11-fold increase.
This means that the liquidity and activity of prediction markets can now rival that of mature altcoin spot markets.
From politics to all categories, the market structure is changing.
The more critical change is that prediction markets are no longer just "political betting tools."
In 2025, the market focus is structurally shifting towards sports, macroeconomics, technology events, and other categories. In Kalshi, sports contracts account for 85% of its trading volume. In Polymarket, sports (39%), politics (34%), and cryptocurrency (18%) together form the three main pillars.
The "2025 Inflation Prediction" market launched by Kalshi has become a leading indicator for traders to monitor CPI data.
Additionally, for events like the release of OpenAI models, Elon Musk's Twitter dynamics, and cryptocurrency ETF approvals, prediction markets provide a real-time betting channel that traditional gambling or financial derivatives markets cannot offer.
02 Binance's ambition in the prediction market
Binance's layout in the prediction market is not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but a carefully designed grand strategy.
Step 1: Testing the waters with a contract prediction platform and user education
As early as March 2024, Binance launched the Futures NEXT platform as a preliminary test of its prediction market strategy.
Users can use 1 USDT to purchase a Pick to predict the next project on Binance's contracts. Successful predictions can earn contract experience vouchers and fee discounts, while failures will have the principal refunded in full after a lock-up period.
This may seem like a marketing activity, but essentially, Binance is using "crowdsourced wisdom" for asset selection. This low-threshold prediction behavior greatly educates users on how to use prediction tools, paving the way for more complex event derivatives in the future.
Step 2: Incubating a professional prediction platform, directly targeting industry leaders
Binance's true ambition is reflected in its support for Opinion Labs.
Opinion Labs, incubated by YZi Labs, has received public support from CZ. This platform has shown an extremely aggressive growth trajectory.
According to BitcoinWorld, Opinion Labs recorded a cumulative trading volume of $6.4 billion within the first 50 days of its launch, with daily trading volume repeatedly exceeding $200 million, surpassing both Kalshi and Polymarket at one point.
Opinion Labs focuses on standardized contracts, particularly macroeconomic data, lowering the participation threshold for institutional players. More importantly, through the low fees of the BNB Chain and the traffic support of the Binance wallet, it quickly established an advantage in the Asia-Pacific region.
Step 3: Ecological synergy, with Binance Chain as the biggest beneficiary
Binance's prediction market layout is not only about earning transaction fees but also about strengthening the BNB ecosystem.
By achieving control over on-chain asset issuance through Alpha, each Alpha project serves as nourishment for BNB, and the popularity of each project translates into demand for BNB. In 2025, as BNB prices continue to break new highs, the layout of the prediction market is an important driving force behind it.
Binance is not the only player.
Robinhood, through its integration with Kalshi, allows 27 million retail investors to participate in event trading with one click. 54% of Kalshi's trading volume comes from Robinhood. Robinhood's prediction market business has reached an annual revenue of $100-300 million and is launching its own native platform.
Coinbase also announced plans in 2025 to launch a prediction market supported by Kalshi, becoming another heavyweight player in this competition.
03 The dual-hero pattern: the battle between compliant factions and decentralized pioneers
Before exchanges like Binance entered the market, a dual-hero pattern had formed between Kalshi and Polymarket.
Representative of the compliant route
Kalshi is a typical compliant faction, founded by MIT graduates. In December 2025, it completed $1 billion in financing, with its valuation soaring to $11 billion, led by Paradigm with participation from Sequoia and a16z. By November 2025, its monthly trading volume reached $5.8 billion, growing more than 30 times since the beginning of the year.
Kalshi's success is attributed to its distribution strategy. Through deep integration with Robinhood, 54% of its trading volume directly comes from Robinhood's 27 million users.
In terms of profit model, Kalshi charges a maximum fee of $0.85 for each profitable contract, with an effective take rate of about 1%. In 2024, it achieved revenue of $24 million, a year-on-year increase of 1,221%. By 2025, its revenue scale has reached hundreds of millions of dollars.
The counterattack of decentralization
Polymarket, with its sensitivity to internet pop culture and real-time news, occupies the highest activity and user stickiness.
In 2025, Polymarket received a $2 billion investment from the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, with a valuation range of $12-15 billion. Its prediction accuracy surpasses that of expert polls, becoming an authoritative source cited by mainstream media.
More critically, Polymarket is preparing to return to the U.S. market. By acquiring the regulated exchange QCEX and planning to collaborate with sports betting giant DraftKings to provide clearing infrastructure, it aims to charge a very low fee of 0.01%, which is 100 times cheaper than Kalshi.
Currently, Polymarket still adopts a zero-fee strategy, primarily monetizing by selling pricing data and future tokenization models to institutions like ICE.
04 Why are prediction markets so profitable?
The appeal of prediction markets lies not only in the explosive trading volume but also in their extremely high user retention rates.
Retention rates far exceed decentralized finance
According to a joint report by Keyrock and Dune, Polymarket's monthly retention rate outperforms 85% of crypto protocols in the market, including wallets, decentralized exchanges, and lending platforms.
The core reason for high retention is that prediction markets are driven by real-world news cycles. Each release of macro data, sports events, or controversial statements from tech giants serves as a narrative reboot, prompting users to return repeatedly.
In contrast, decentralized finance protocols often lose users after price volatility subsides. Once users establish a habit of obtaining information through predictions, their participation frequency shifts from random trading to regularly and habitually focusing on specific categories.
Massive influx of traditional internet users
The collaboration between Kalshi and Robinhood, along with Polymarket's breakout during the election period, has led many users who have never interacted with smart contracts to start trying this new tool. The proportion and retention rate of Web2 users are extremely high, surpassing the vast majority of wallets and protocols in the crypto space.
This proves that the information product of prediction results has a more intuitive and stronger appeal to the general public than holding digital assets.
Clear monetization paths
Kalshi achieved hundreds of millions in revenue in 2025 with a 1% effective take rate. Although Polymarket adopts a zero-fee strategy, it has established a stable monetization channel by selling pricing data to institutions. Robinhood's prediction market business has reached an annual revenue of $100-300 million.
The valuation logic of prediction markets no longer focuses solely on trading volume but comprehensively considers: trading volume × retention rate × prediction accuracy × strategic synergy. Polymarket's $15 billion valuation includes a significant premium for its role as a global real-time consensus pricing authority.
05 Insider trading and regulatory games
As the scale of funds explodes, the ethical and legal risks faced by prediction markets are also magnifying.
By the end of 2025, there have been frequent incidents of precise betting on important releases from tech giants in the prediction market. A typical case is that before Google released important data and OpenAI launched GPT-5.2, several Polymarket accounts exhibited unusual predictive abilities. One account even made over $1 million in profit in a single day through Google-related contracts.
This prompted companies like Coinbase to update employee policies, explicitly prohibiting employees from using insider information to participate in prediction markets. This marks the formal entry of prediction markets into the compliance vision of large enterprises.
On the regulatory front, although the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission currently does not regulate prediction market contracts, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is tightening its stance. Kalshi's success lies in its strict regulation as a designated contract market, while Polymarket is building a compliance facade through the acquisition of QCEX and collaboration with DraftKings.
Regions like Connecticut have ordered some platforms to cease prediction operations, and this state-level legal uncertainty remains one of the biggest risks in the industry.
06 Conclusion
The ultimate vision of prediction markets is to financialize everything, meaning any disagreement can be transformed into a tradable asset. In the future, companies may hedge R&D risks on prediction markets, and farmers may hedge localized weather risks, which offers more flexibility and real-time pricing capabilities than traditional insurance.
For large platforms like Binance, Coinbase, and Robinhood, prediction markets are not only a new source of revenue but also a strategically significant traffic entry point.
In the future, there may no longer be independent prediction market applications; instead, every top wealth management platform or exchange will integrate prediction modules alongside spot, futures, and ETFs.
Binance's entry is just the beginning of this transformation.
As prediction markets transition from marginal tools to mainstream financial infrastructure, whoever can first resolve the contradiction between "large-scale compliance" and "rapid liquidity" will become the dominant player in global financial infrastructure for the next decade.
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