Author: Changan, Amelia I Biteye Content Team

The meme is ebbing, and the prediction market is taking over. This is not a guess; it is a capital migration that is happening.

When Polymarket secured a full license in the U.S. and received a $2 billion investment from the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, you should understand:

The era of trading cats and dogs memes is over; the era of trading "truth" has officially begun.

This article will take you to:

Understand why the prediction market has suddenly exploded;

List the dark horse projects on the BNB chain worth ambushing;

Teach you step by step how to layout in advance and reap early dividends.

1. Why has the prediction market suddenly become popular?

The moment market sentiment truly shifts is often not during a crash, but during numbness.

You will find: the meme coins are still being issued, but you are too lazy to click on them;
The narratives are still flying, but all that is left in your mind is one sentence: in the end, they will all go to zero.

The meme did not die suddenly.

It died from a structural contradiction: tokens are permanent, but attention is fleeting.

When Pump.fun lowered the threshold for issuing tokens to nearly zero, supply began to expand exponentially; while retail investors' time, emotions, and funds are linear. The result is only one: the hot topics become shorter and the downtrends become longer.

At this moment, a new gameplay that seems "less exciting" but is more brutal began to quietly absorb the funds lost by memes.

It is called: the prediction market.

1.1 The more uncertain the world, the more people need the truth

In this era of information explosion and fragmentation, the media often can only provide timely news but cannot guarantee accuracy.

For example: someone used AI to forge a CZ autobiography, complete with a full outline on the cover, uploaded it to Apple Books and other publishing platforms, and even fooled the media. At that time, the market cap of the meme book was even inflated to three million dollars.

Under the mechanism of memes, speculators can know the news first by scanning the chain, but they often also easily become the liquidity of rumors. Because in the logic of "speed is everything," the cost of verifying authenticity is too high; by the time you finish checking the information, the token price may have already gone to zero.

This is precisely the significance of the prediction market: it introduces the Skin in the Game mechanism, forcing participants to reveal their true expectations through the game of real money.

Its logic is simple: Talk is cheap, show me the money.

The prediction market is the process of converting "cognition" into "assets." In the initial state where Yes and No each account for 50%, participants vote with real money; the more buyers there are, the higher the price, and the price fluctuations quantify the real probability of an event occurring in real time.

1.2 From "trading tokens" to "trading events": speculation has upgraded

The decline of memes is fundamentally due to: assets being issued too quickly, while attention runs even faster. When attention is scattered, what remains is the permanently existing tokens, and downtrends become the norm.

The prediction market solves several problems:

1. There is a clear settlement date: it focuses speculative funds on the window period of events, and once the event ends, funds are settled, ensuring there are always winners. This solves the problem of the downtrend tormenting memes.
2. Friendly to speculators: by providing clear win-lose results, it ensures that there are always users who can gain settlement profits, fundamentally improving the survival environment for speculators.
3. More concentrated funds: no longer troubled by infinite diversion and similarly named tokens, but rather focusing attention on a limited number of important events.

This is not just a change in gameplay, but an upgrade in the dimension of speculation. You don’t need to run faster than anyone else; you just need to see more accurately.

1.3 Compliance breakthrough, institutional entry

The prediction market can thrive not only because of its good mechanism but also because it has been recognized by regulators.

On September 3 this year, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan successfully ended a years-long tug-of-war with regulators. Polymarket broke Kalshi's long-standing monopoly in the compliant market, proving that the prediction market can break out of the "legal gray area" and transform into a transparent and compliant "information derivatives market."

More than a month later, on October 7, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, ICE, invested $2 billion, officially bringing the prediction market into the sights of Wall Street. This marks the official entry of the prediction market as a new asset class into the core of global finance.

The breakthrough in compliance has completely eliminated legal concerns for institutional funds entering. The prediction market is quickly shedding the label of "crypto niche toy" and officially evolving into a financial infrastructure that quantifies global risks and public opinion trends, on par with the S&P index and gold prices.

As shown in the chart, the weekly trading volume of the prediction market has recently experienced an unprecedented exponential explosion, peaking at over $4 billion.

(Data source: Dune)

2. The leading players and rising stars in the prediction market

2.1 Kalshi: The lone warrior bravely confronting regulation

Before discussing the prediction market, we must pay tribute to Kalshi. If Polymarket gained freedom through a shell company, Kalshi tore open the compliance gap through direct confrontation.

Before 2024, the U.S. prediction market was basically in a gray area, with the greatest uncertainty coming from regulatory attitudes. Kalshi obtained the CFTC's Designated Contract Market (DCM) license as early as 2020, becoming the first regulated platform focused on event contracts. Since then, it has engaged in a protracted battle with the CFTC over the approval of political contracts - between 2023 and 2024, the CFTC temporarily banned related contracts, and Kalshi directly took the matter to court and won, ultimately forcing the CFTC to abandon its appeal in 2025.

This victory is seen by many as a key turning point for the legalization of prediction markets: this is not gambling, but a protected financial derivatives market.

The cost of compliance seems high, but what it brings is institutional-level trust and a regulatory moat. Kalshi is the earliest and most mature fully regulated platform by the CFTC, allowing U.S. institutions and retail investors to legally and directly trade event contracts in U.S. dollars. Although competitors like Polymarket are gradually returning to the U.S. market by the end of 2025, Kalshi's first-mover advantage and strict compliance model still make many feel that this value is worth it.

However, the cost of compliance is self-isolation. Strict KYC, limited to U.S. users, can only operate within the "local network" of the U.S. market. This weakens its connection with a much larger global user base.

2.2 Polymarket: The first-generation king, but not the endgame

If Kalshi won in court, then Polymarket undoubtedly won in the market, with the capital market providing the most genuine answer with real money.

This year, its valuation achieved a triple jump, soaring from the unicorn threshold of $1 billion at the beginning of the year to $8 billion (after receiving a $2 billion investment from the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange), and there are even recent reports that it is seeking a new round of valuation at $15 billion.

During the U.S. election period, it carried a massive amount of capital speculation. For just the "2024 U.S. Presidential Election" prediction pool, the cumulative trading volume has exceeded $3.2 billion.

Upon closer inspection, Polymarket's success stems from a dual victory in product and compliance:

From the product perspective: it strives to downplay the "gambling" attribute and instead emphasize the information attribute. During the election period, even CNN and Bloomberg referenced its odds. It successfully established a sense of authority, making users feel that betting is not gambling, but pricing information.

Moreover, compared to early prediction markets like Augur, Polymarket has optimized user experience to the extreme. There are no obscure on-chain interactions, and it settles directly in USDC stablecoins. It allows Web2 users to seamlessly enter the prediction market.

From the compliance perspective: Polymarket proactively reconciled with regulators (CFTC). This "fine" is actually the "ticket" to enter the mainstream world; it cleared compliance barriers and laid the groundwork for its upcoming entry into the U.S. market.

However, this compliance + focus on the top approach has its limitations.

Polymarket's success is built on a model of high control and heavy operation. While this model is safe, it is extremely inefficient. It is like a finely-tuned workshop, heavily reliant on the aesthetic of the official team and institutional funds to maintain operations. This allows it to perform perfectly in the face of super products like the U.S. election, but when faced with more fragmented and high-frequency public demands, this centralized framework becomes too slow and cumbersome.

It successfully validated the prediction market from 0 to 1, but the core contradictions that hinder the industry from exploding from 1 to 100 remain unresolved in its model.

2.3 The seven unresolved issues of the prediction market

If we peel away the label of Polymarket as the leader of the prediction market and deeply experience the product, we will find that Polymarket still has many fatal issues.

1. Centralized market creation and operation reliance: Existing platforms like Polymarket have a natural "cognitive wall" for non-English speaking users due to geographical and cultural differences. Moreover, the current market creation heavily relies on the official team's screening, leading to extreme concentration of resources in commercially viable tracks.

This "centralized" creation directly leads to the desolation of niche markets, with many interesting demands in vertical fields being ignored due to lack of operation. For example, Chinese-speaking users are unfamiliar with the high liquidity tracks of politics and culture on Polymarket and do not want to spend too much time on these tracks. Meanwhile, some niche tracks that certain Chinese-speaking users understand and are interested in lack liquidity.

2. Liquidity threshold brought by order book model: Existing mainstream platforms adopt an order book model, which means that every new market requires sufficient liquidity walls; otherwise, small trades can trigger severe price fluctuations, damaging user experience and forming a negative cycle of "insufficient liquidity → user loss → further liquidity shrinkage."

This order book model leads to poor trading experiences for long-tail and niche topics due to lack of initial liquidity.

3. User experience gaps: Apart from liquidity, another criticized issue is the poor user experience.

In short-term predictions targeting high-volatility assets like BTC/ETH, the market probabilities can fluctuate wildly with real-time price movements. Due to the time lag between front-end display and on-chain transactions, users may place orders to buy "Yes" at low probabilities, only to find that the probability has jumped to high by the time the transaction is executed.

The probability at the time of transaction is not the same as the probability at the time of clicking, and this poor initial experience often leads to a very high user attrition rate.

4. Low settlement efficiency: When users finally win after much effort, they find that their profits have not yet been credited and must wait for market settlement.

The "result adjudication" process for many markets is very slow. For example, Polymarket relies on the UMA oracle, and a controversial market may take several days or even longer, going through multiple rounds of voting before it can finally settle, leading to prolonged capital occupation. The design of the UMA oracle (Optimistic Oracle) poses a potential risk of cheating to alter the final market results.

5. Insufficient scalability of oracles: Currently, oracles heavily rely on the decentralized adjudication mechanism of "human power" (such as UMA voters) and cannot efficiently handle the potentially thousands of permissionless markets that may emerge in the future.

When the number of markets explodes, this "arbitration system" will be overwhelmed.

6. Single LP earnings: Not only do retail users have a poor experience, but LPs in the market are also not doing well.

Due to the nature of the prediction market mechanism, being an LP in the prediction market means that the earnings model is single and the risk exposure is difficult to manage, which limits the willingness of professional market makers and DeFi funds to enter.

Additionally, participants in the prediction market find it difficult to use their positions in other DeFi scenarios (such as staking), limiting the application scenarios.

7. Market manipulation: However, the above issues are not the worst; the following problem is a direct challenge to the "existential foundation" of the prediction market.

The original intention of the prediction market is to measure the authenticity of events, but when the profit motive is strong enough, participants' motivations will shift from "measuring events" to "driving events," allowing the market to endorse this created "fact."

If the market results are ultimately determined by media reports, then the optimal strategy will be to spend money to bribe the media rather than study the event itself. At this point, the market is no longer a "truth discovery machine," but a financial tool that provides legitimacy to manipulated facts.

The "Green Dildo" incident on the WNBA court in August this year is a typical case: In the Polymarket market regarding "whether there will be thrown objects in the court," the mainstream positions leaned towards "will not happen (No)," leading to very high odds for "will happen (Yes)."

Participants found that they only needed to spend a few dozen dollars to buy tickets and props, and with minimal risk of violation, they could enter the court and throw, thereby leveraging prediction profits worth thousands of dollars.

2.4 Where is the new generation of prediction markets evolving?

The problems faced by Polymarket are precisely the best entry points for newcomers. For newcomers without historical burdens, there is no need to replicate a "cautious giant." The pain points of the market have already provided clear guidance: users are tired of audits and are calling for freedom; funds are tired of inefficiency and are craving leverage.

1. Moving towards a permissionless creation model: In response to the niche market scarcity caused by official screening, the new generation of prediction markets is committed to lowering the barriers to market creation.

Through algorithm-driven automatic liquidity mechanisms, anyone can quickly establish prediction events targeting specific cultural circles (such as Chinese niche markets), niche technical topics, or vertical industry dynamics, achieving true "everything can be priced."

2. Introducing leverage to enhance capital efficiency and attractiveness: To address the long-standing issues of "high capital occupation rate and insufficient yield elasticity" in prediction markets, introducing leverage is the core variable to activate liquidity:

Traditional $0-1 prediction contracts are essentially full spot trades. With leverage introduced, users can bet with minimal margin to gain excess returns during major event explosions (such as 10x leverage predicting a Fed rate hike). This not only attracts high-frequency speculators but also allows institutional investors to hedge macro risks at lower costs.

For markets with a win rate of up to 90% but very low odds, ordinary users often lack interest in participation. The leverage mechanism can amplify the volatility returns of low-odds markets, allowing markets that were originally "highly certain but unprofitable" to regain liquidity depth.

Although leverage is key to enhancing capital efficiency, its implementation path in prediction markets is still in the exploratory stage. The simple "collateralized position to obtain assets" model has inherent flaws in prediction markets. Due to the generally poor liquidity of prediction markets and the binary settlement mechanism (prices can experience dramatic fluctuations from 0 to 1 at the moment of settlement), this makes it difficult for the system to achieve smooth clearing during volatile moments.

3. Deepening vertical fields: No longer pursuing "big and comprehensive," but rather turning to deep pricing in vertical fields. For example: Football fun, which specializes in the sports track, and Limitless, which focuses on cryptocurrency price predictions.

Vertical platforms can attract traders with a high degree of professional consensus by focusing on specific tracks (such as sports, cryptocurrency volatility, or macroeconomic data). This precision in participant profiles ensures that funds are no longer dispersed in ineffective markets but instead form a high order book depth in core areas, significantly reducing slippage costs for large trades.

4. Enhancing user experience: From "independent applications" to "traffic aggregation." Giants like Coinbase and Jupiter have traffic, but the cost of building their own prediction markets is extremely high (involving compliance, oracle, odds calculation, etc.). Therefore, the industry is evolving towards an "aggregator model":

Prediction markets do not have a unified CA like meme coins. Giants leverage their traffic advantages as the front end, integrating underlying liquidity from Kalshi and others to solve the user pain point of "not finding markets," which will greatly improve market discovery and trading experience.

3. Overview of prediction market projects in the BNB Chain ecosystem

Looking at several major public chains: Solana is seeking transformation due to the ebbing of memes, and Base is focusing on the creator economy; meanwhile, after the unveiling of Yzi labs S2, the BNB ecosystem's strong support for prediction markets is a clear betting signal.

Moreover, the prediction market on the BNB Chain has developed in a completely different pattern from other ecosystems: several recently launched prediction markets have almost all chosen to issue tokens through ICOs, with Football fun choosing to ICO on Legion, only airdropping to 1,000 users; Space chose ICO with no airdrop. In contrast, the prediction markets on the BNB Chain have all chosen to airdrop as a way to give back to the community.

So we need to take a closer look at the prediction market projects in the BNB ecosystem.

3.1 The racetrack of prediction markets on the BNB Chain

@opinionlabsxyz led by Yzi Labs, completed a $5 million seed round financing, with participants including Echo, Animoca Ventures, Manifold Trading, Amber Group, and others. The platform is growing rapidly and has entered the top three prediction markets, transitioning from a niche tool to a macro financial infrastructure. Users interested in macro trading, DeFi, and event prediction should experience it deeply. Recently, Dune released an 88-page industry report, and Opinion was rated as a "leading example of macro prediction markets." Cumulative nominal trading volume has exceeded $8.2 billion (from $180 million on the first day to now), with multiple single-day volumes exceeding $200 million.

@predictdotfun Predict.fun is the native DeFi prediction market on the BNB Chain, founded by former Binance research head and PancakeSwap founder @dingaling. Graduated from EASY S2. Unlike other prediction market projects, Predict.fun allows prediction positions to be used as DeFi funds, supporting yield, lending, and leverage through on-chain protocols, enhancing capital efficiency and permissionless liquidity. Currently, Predict.fun has taken snapshots of historically active trading addresses from BNB Chain meme traders, Aster DEX, Polymarket, Limitless, Myriad, Opinion, and others. Users can check their eligibility and unlock points for airdrops through tasks (depositing, inviting tweets, completing specified trading volumes). It achieved over $10M in trading volume on its first day.

@0xProbable is a native on-chain prediction protocol co-incubated by PancakeSwap and Yzi Labs. It offers zero-fee predictions, supports deposits in any token (automatically converted to USDT), and allows anyone to start new markets. Secured by UMA's Oracle, it focuses on unique events such as sports and cryptocurrency price trends, and users can earn points through a rewards program. It just officially went live on the 18th of this month, supporting zero-fee predictions. Currently, multiple real-time event markets are open, such as NBA games (e.g., Grizzlies vs Timberwolves, Bulls vs Cavaliers, etc.).

@42 graduated from EASY S2, transforming real-world event outcomes into liquid, tradable token assets through the introduction of Bonding Curve. This design continuously produces high volatility, high liquidity, and ultimately fair and transparent settlements. 42 transcends the category of prediction markets and resembles an "event asset issuance platform." Founder @Leozayaat repeatedly emphasizes that 42 is not a traditional variant of prediction markets but a new asset class, with core mechanisms different from any prediction market or launchpad, allowing users to buy and sell freely without worrying about liquidity. It creates an event asset issuance platform based on real events, theoretically never having "rug pulls." This is a very elegant mechanism innovation, with the potential to further drive the upgrade of the entire ecosystem's gameplay. The mainnet mechanism has been tested and is planned to launch a new, more beautiful UI by the end of January. Currently, it is actively promoting event markets in the Beta phase.

@Bentodotfun graduated from EASY S2 and received support from Base (Batches 001 - Second Prize). The prediction market is a truth engine but faces challenges such as difficulty in discovery, lack of personalization, isolation, and limited profit space. Bento allows users to reorganize global prediction markets with user-generated markets, creating market designs such as challenges and tournaments, thereby providing better discovery mechanisms for markets and traders. Just like Roblox did for the gaming industry: building personalized games like LEGO, inviting friends, and establishing micro-economies; Bento is doing the same for the prediction market. They believe trading and speculation are new types of games but also require social-native, user-generated models to achieve rapid growth. The core team includes co-founders @abhitejxyz and @PratyakshInani. They were previously co-founders of Filament and have built together for five years. Currently, it is in the Early Access testing phase (not yet officially launched for trading on the mainnet).

3.2 The infrastructure of prediction markets also needs layout

As mentioned earlier, the prediction market is not just a platform mechanism issue; there are still areas that need to change in infrastructure. The BNB Chain ecosystem clearly recognizes this: it is evident that merely improving the platform is not enough; innovation in infrastructure is also needed. Therefore, it has introduced parts of prediction market infrastructure into the ecosystem.

@APROOracle: An AI-enhanced decentralized oracle platform focused on providing high-fidelity, reliable off-chain data for cutting-edge ecosystems. It vertically serves high-growth areas such as RWA, AI agents, prediction markets, and DeFi. Graduated from EASY S1, with other institutional supporters including Polychain Capital, Franklin Templeton (FTDAUS), ABCDE, etc., it has completed multiple rounds of financing. Currently, the platform has completed over 77K data validations and 78K AI oracle calls, continuously providing data support for top RWA, AI, and prediction market projects. The token $AT has already been listed on Binance spot, with a current market cap of $28M and FDV of $122M. It is one of the leading projects in S1.

@soraoracle: A self-governing decentralized oracle built on the BNB Chain, focusing on providing a layer of autonomous truth for real-world events in prediction markets. The platform is in its early stages, and developers can deploy production-level prediction markets with its TypeScript SDK + CLI with one click.

4. Summary of KOL Perspectives

@Dune (on-chain data platform): The prediction market is not gambling but is becoming the most accurate information network in the world. More accurate than polls and expert surveys, faster than econometric models, clearer hedging mechanisms than traditional derivatives, and more transparent signals than media reports.

Matt Huang (Founder of Paradigm) @matthuang: The prediction market is a truth-telling machine on a civilizational scale, but it is also a way to find interesting and useful financial exposures that meet social demands in a breadth-first manner.

Ella (Head of Yzi Labs) @ellazhang516: Prediction is an innate human nature, practiced from hunting to AI, and the prediction market built on this has enormous potential. The real opportunity lies not in replicating Polymarket but in solving its pain points - using faster oracles, seamless user experiences, and aggregated liquidity to embed prediction behavior into everyday scenarios like TikTok, evolving it from a trading product into a societal-level infrastructure for truth and consensus.

Winry (KOL) @vonzz6: Her experience and personal views on the three major prediction market projects on the BNB Chain, pointing out from a product perspective that the prediction markets on the BNB Chain have entered a high-frequency gaming stage, marking the maturity shift from "single platform dominance" to "multi-dimensional product competition."

Sean Zi Qi (KOL) @Seanzhao1105: Analysis of the racetrack mechanism of Binance's prediction markets, citing Taleb's theory, points out that the intense competition within the BNB Chain is essentially "achieving system evolution through individual sacrifice." While this competition may eat into the data of first-mover projects (like Opinion), this brutal screening mechanism constructs an extremely robust and self-iterating prediction market system for the entire Binance ecosystem.

EWL (KOL) @jeg6322: Comparing emerging prediction markets, he points out that differentiation is the core competitiveness. After reviewing five new projects, he notes that Solana's @factmach has the most product innovation targeting "subjective opinions," while BNB Chain's @predictdotfun relies more on CZ's social endorsement.

TIGER (KOL) @tiger_web3: Commentary on the three prediction market projects in the BNB Chain racetrack, he believes that the current prediction market track shows a trend of "L2-ization," where project competition is increasingly purely about background, fame, and ecological resources, while the requirements for pure technical innovation are decreasing.

Jiayi (Founder of XDO) @mscryptojiayi: She points out that the new generation of prediction markets is showing a combination of UGC + Bonding Curve characteristics. Unlike Pump.fun's emotional mapping, the new paradigm transforms "PVP zero-sum games" into "event outcomes that can be settled" deterministic games.

BITWU (KOL / 4XLabs) @Bitwux: He points out that the prediction market has a clear explosive trend this year, with extremely clear long-term logic: when information is priced, probabilities become assets. Moreover, prediction markets are unafraid of bull and bear markets; gamblers will always exist, and this is its narrative charm.

5. Step-by-step guide: How can retail investors participate?

The prediction markets on the BNB Chain are all in the early stages, and we can accumulate potential rewards (usually in the form of points, which may later convert to token airdrops) by using the platforms. The specific strategies are divided into two categories:

1) For projects like Opinion and Predict.fun that have already launched, trading volume is the future airdrop; trading is mining.

2) For projects like Bento and 42 that have not yet undergone public testing, register in advance for the waitlist.

Let’s take a closer look at how to participate in these projects:

1. Steady choice: Opinion Labs

Opinion is currently a good choice: visit app.opinion.trade, connect your wallet, and accumulate points through market orders, limit orders, providing liquidity, or holding positions (points distributed weekly based on activity volume). Points will be related to future tokens.

2. Zero-fee trial: Probable

Probable is more early-stage: visit probable.markets for zero-fee prediction trading (supports any token automatically converted to USDT). Currently, there is no formal points system, but the official website has a points page, and many users choose to participate with small amounts and remain active on Discord, looking forward to subsequent points launch or retroactive rewards.

3. For the opportunists: Predict.fun

Predict.fun is currently in the airdrop phase, based on your trading snapshots on platforms like Polymarket, Opinion Labs, Aster, Limitless, Myriad, etc., but a certain trading volume is required to unlock the airdrop.

4. New gameplay: 42

Currently in whitelist internal testing, with an innovative mechanism (Bonding Curve issuing event assets). Everyone is welcome to use the Biteye invitation code BITEYE25 for early testing.

5. Mysterious gift: Bento

Bento is currently in Alpha Testnet and is expected to launch the mainnet in early January. Go to waitlist.bento.fun to register for the waitlist for a chance to experience it early and win a Bento Mystery Box.

6. Conclusion

From Pump.fun to HyperLiquid, the crypto industry has shifted from the "fat protocols" of mass wheel-making to "fat applications."

In the past, we were obsessed with high-performance public chains and complex L2 architectures, but this is merely an excess of infrastructure. The real value lies in who can carry genuine trading demands.

The prediction market is the ultimate form of such "fat applications" - it does not produce information, but it provides the most precise pricing venue for fragmented cognition worldwide.

Polymarket is just the prologue to this transformation. In the future, the prediction market will become an unchanging infrastructure for quantifying the world. Will you choose to continue gambling in a game of passing the parcel, or will you price the future with your cognition in the market of truth?

The answer lies in the moment you place your bet.

(This article is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. The market has risks; please participate rationally.)