Concept

Product-focused prediction markets designed to provide leveraged return outcomes, ease-of-use and social engagement.

Longer Description

Prediction markets are mostly well-understood to be platforms where participants can buy/sell shares tied to the probability of some specific future event. The idea being these markets leverage the collective wisdom of participants willing to risk capital tied to their views of various outcomes. Presumably putting your money where your mouth is. Participants can trade shares based on their conviction (or where they think risk/return is worth it) and as new information comes available, market prices change & reflect the prevailing aggregate consensus. Thus far these have most commonly cropped up around election results, geopolitical events & pop culture.

Development over the last decade:

Early Platform Period (2010-2015) – early versions of betting on political election events or economic indicator results (Intrade forced to shut down because of regulatory issues/challenges)

Intro of Crypto-based Prediction Markets (2015-2018) – Augur was built on Ethereum during this period and allowed users to vote on almost any type of event they wanted; very clunky back then, v2 had a few different options (binary, up to 8 choice outcomes, scalar, i.e. 0-100) but was difficult to use (one of a few reasons it failed)

Better UX But Still Niche (2018-today) – PredictIt became popular for US political events, operating within some regulatory constraints, Polymarket launched and gained traction as a decentralized version of these; there are a handful of others (Manifold, Kalshi, etc)

Nobody has quite won this market but it’s been interesting for a lot of reasons – gambling becoming more socially acceptable, breadth & depth of data available has exploded, 24/7 markets, alternative financial systems, etc

Other Thoughts

Biggest problems continue to be: