Alana Levin
There are now several large and growing prediction market platforms, and a slew of additional platforms set to launch this fall. Market volumes have remained strong throughout the year, refuting critics who claimed prediction markets only had pmf during election season.
This setup has created additional greenfield opportunities for founders to build within / around prediction markets — opportunities that capitalize on the new market liquidity, greater distribution of users, fragmentation of market platforms, and more. These are some of the products I’d especially like to see built.
Conditional wagers. Parlays are common in sports betting. They’re hard to structure within prediction markets because participants are betting against other peers rather than the house. The difference means that the bettor is taking positions against multiple distinct counterparties vs. a single counterparty (the house). As a result, it’s both harder to close the bet if a parlay leg fails and more challenging to price / control the total risk.
A solution may be to make it so the user is actually only betting against one party. For instance, one could imagine a third-party service emerging / built on top of open prediction markets that acts like the house. This service would use the liquidity in the prediction markets to structure odds and offer parlays. It could operate cross-platform and accept third-party liquidity for its strategies (similar to Hyperliquid’s HLP). If the parlays focus on things like the price action of Bitcoin, this service could also use other mechanisms to hedge the overall risk.
The ability to bet on users. A major feature of platforms like Polymarket is the leaderboard. It gives a ranking of traders by both P&L and volume, and lets third parties explore what positions those power users hold. Say I believe that a certain trader is going to do well — my “bet” is that the trader bets well. My main option today to build exposure to that bet is to manually copy trade the user. A future form of a product, though, could let a user like myself deposit capital into a pool that the pro trader can use for their bets. This design space gets even more exciting when one starts to think about AI agents betting in markets — and the different ways that humans could pool capital and provide information / feedback for those agents to utilize.
There are many other types of second-order opportunities stemming from the growth of liquidity, interest, and platforms supporting prediction markets. Leverage, exposure to the size of a market, and exposure to the popularity of a market (in terms of users participating) are all areas of interest.
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