The decentralized prediction market platform Polymarket recently revealed a noteworthy phenomenon through its data. In April 2025, the number of newly created markets on the platform broke through the 7,000 mark, setting a historical record and demonstrating the vibrant market creation activity. However, the platform's overall trading volume and number of active traders did not rise in sync, and this divergence between market creation enthusiasm and trading participation has sparked an in-depth industry discussion about the underlying market dynamics and changes in user behavior patterns.
Market Creation Fever and the Subtle Divergence of Trading Activities
The core mechanism of the Polymarket platform is to empower users to independently create and trade prediction markets covering diverse real-world events, including politics, economics, sports, and even crypto.
Entering 2025, market creation activities on the Polymarket platform have shown a significant acceleration. Notably, in April 2025, the number of newly created markets broke through 7,000, setting a platform record. This data represents a 20.7% growth from 5,800 markets in March of the same year, clearly reflecting the significantly increased enthusiasm of market creators on the platform.
In stark contrast to the surge in market creation numbers, Polymarket's overall trading activity appears relatively flat. Specifically, the number of active traders on the platform dropped from about 462,000 in January 2025 to approximately 330,000 in April, indicating a certain contraction in the scale of independent users actually participating in trading. However, the platform's total trading volume remains stable, with the total bet amount in April approaching $900 million, which is still considerable, but shows a significant difference compared to the trading volume peak of $2.6 billion in January.
Momentum Behind the Data: Market Creators and Airdrop Expectations
Polymarket's trading volume is often significantly driven by major events, such as highly anticipated sporting events (like the Super Bowl final), speculative predictions about specific crypto asset price trends (such as Bitcoin price predictions), and key macroeconomic dynamics (like market expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts or predictions about U.S.-China trade agreements).
The significant data gap between the decline in active trading addresses and the surge in market creation numbers leads us to delve deeper into the fundamental drivers behind this trend.
One possible explanation is that the user structure of the Polymarket platform may be undergoing a transformation, gradually tilting towards a more focused "market creator" core group, with observations indicating that these creators are discovering and launching new prediction market targets with extremely high efficiency.
This acceleration of creation activity is highly likely closely related to their psychological expectations of potential future platform "Airdrop" activities. In the crypto industry's convention, projects often distribute platform tokens through airdrops to early participants or active users, thereby incentivizing community participation and promoting ecosystem health.
Another interpretation is that this could be a signal of crypto retail investors' return, with market creators potentially expecting to increase their chances of receiving rewards in potential future airdrop activities by actively creating markets and providing early liquidity.
Looking Forward: The Art of Balancing Growth and User Participation
The data landscape presented by Polymarket in April 2025 reveals a divergence of "high creation, stable trading," highlighting not only the uniqueness of prediction markets as a financial tool but also emphasizing its deeper value as a platform for knowledge discovery and information aggregation based on collective intelligence and market-driven speculative mechanisms.
How its potential airdrop strategy will be designed and implemented, and what profound impact this strategy will have on the platform's long-term ecosystem health and community structure, will undoubtedly remain a focus of high attention for industry observers, participants, and researchers. Future prediction markets related to major political events such as the U.S. Presidential Election (such as various event predictions related to the current President Trump) have been a traditional strength and traffic pillar of the Polymarket platform, and are expected to continue attracting significant user attention and capital investment, serving as an important window for observing platform development.
