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Prediction markets have been the discovery story of 2025. Previously a narrow and unknown category, companies have exploded in the space of prediction markets. These companies have now raised funds with billion dollar valuations to fuel their popularity and growth.
The best known are Polymarket which received an investment of $2 billion from the owner of NYSE Intercontinental Exchange at a valuation of $9 billion and Kalshi which raised $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion, both in October. Prediction market players such as Opinion, Limitless, and Myriad have also raised funds or are seeing growth in their users.
With this fever of prediction in mind, what happens next? Can these platforms, which are often based on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, bring in a new group of users? Could blockchain bring the next billion, the fever dream of every cryptocurrency citizen?
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The path of prediction
Although platforms like Kalshi The Polmarket may seem like it appeared out of nowhere in 2025 to non-specialists, but prediction markets are actually nothing new on the scene.
“They have been in cryptocurrency for a long time. We have Gnosis and Augur, which were some of the first ICOs to try,” explained Shresth Agrawal, CEO of Pod, a Tier 1 blockchain.
In August 2015, Augur raised $5.5 million in an ICO. In April 2017, Gnosis raised $12.5 million through an ICO that was sold out in ten minutes. Augur continues to move forward, with the release of version 2 that supports… DAI stablecoin Its symbol is REP, which has seen significant increases over the past year. Gnosis has moved away from forecasts to deliver its highly profitable multisig portfolio Safe, which has secured $100 million in funding by 2022.
During the first administration of Trump, in 2020, Kalshi was able to obtain the approval of the CTFC to be a contract market designed to exchange event contracts. While Kalshi operates on a closed system rather than a blockchain, this approval paved the way for on-chain prediction markets.
He founded Polymarket in 2020, uses USDC in Polygon, and is truly the first on-chain prediction market to change the blockchain game.
“What we’re really seeing is the emergence of a new design space for financial and information markets,” said Neeraj Pant, an investor in Polymarket’s Series A funding round.
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Increasing market access
This emergence is driven by a massive influx of money entering prediction market platforms. In early November, the total nominal volume traded in the prediction markets reached an all-time high of $3.3 billion according to data aggregator Dune Analytics. Calsh had about $1 billion, PolyMarket had about $1 billion, and the newly launched Opinione platform on the BNB chain led the way with a $1.4 billion wallet.
Pant, the PolyMarket Seed investor, sees the increase in popularity of these platforms as evidence of traders’ recognition of the new financial markets that these platforms can open.
“There is a larger market access story here,” Pant told BeInCrypto. Sports betting systems offer some political betting options, but the list is often limited for low risk appetites.
Prediction markets, on the other hand, seek to facilitate financing for events of all kinds. Before, Pant says, “the average individual investor could not easily bet on whether the Fed cut rates, or whether a particular politician would win in a specific market, or even whether Tesla shares would rise or fall, depending on where they lived,” he added.
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“Now they can.”
What is the next step?
New categories in the field of prediction markets are constantly emerging. One of these categories that is gaining popularity is the “male markets” where bets are made on what celebrities or other public figures say. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, recently recited a list of words in his market on his company’s earnings call; It has been voraciously consumed by encrypted social media.
The next frontier for prediction markets: bringing users into cryptocurrency who don’t know they’re using cryptocurrency.
said Vincent Manglito, founder Pentagon Pizza Watch“I think the most powerful thing about Polymarket is that they don’t even carry the traditional crypto brand,” said a data tracker to help inform traders at Forecast Markets. The idea is that if the pizzerias in the Pentagon area are crowded, it could mean that there is an event that is being prepared where the employees are too busy to eat and are just ordering pizza.
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“Most users who are familiar with them or even deal with them do not understand that there is a blockchain infrastructure under the hood,” Manglito added about the prediction markets. “Running products that feel intuitive, fun and culturally relevant is exactly how the next billion users will come,” he continued.
one billion? really?
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts strive to reach the ultimate goal of getting billions of users to adopt blockchain. Can on-chain prediction markets really bring in a billion new crypto users?
Currently, these blockchain-based prediction markets attract hundreds of thousands of users per week — 274,000 last week, according to Dunn. It is clearly still in its infancy – but it is also clear that this market and the number of arenas will see growth.
This is likely to increase due to the number of markets available, Pod’s Aggarwal points out. “Basically, any kind of information that exists on the Internet, or could exist in the future, can be the basis of a market.” New markets for prediction can become new tokens that build new narratives that often lead users to the blockchain.
He stated that the blockchain infrastructure has become so good that users do not even need to know that digital currencies are used in the background for these markets to predict how these arenas will grow. As Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong said To X In October: “In 10 years, a lot of people will be using cryptocurrencies, but they won’t know they’re using them.”
