Chainfeeds Summary:
The biggest financial opportunities in 2026 are the cyclical fluctuations of the midterm elections and the World Cup, FIFA's appeasement of Trump, and regulators' approval of DeFi and gambling, making it a truly big year for finance.
Article source:
https://x.com/zuoyeweb3/status/2002645026002907339
Article Author:
Zuo Ye
Opinion:
Zuo Ye: Overall, the market has evolved into four models: 1) Copycat platforms outside of Polymarket and Kalshi, requiring Perp DEX-level investment and subsequent high compliance costs in the US market, will generally move towards the TGE track with almost no real adoption. 2) Asset-layer innovation targeting existing prediction platforms: DeFiizing the betting assets in prediction markets, such as Gondor allowing them to be used as collateral for lending, and Space adding 10x leverage, which is essentially violently injecting DeFi elements; there are also prediction markets with innovative assets such as 42 Space that directly generate prediction topics based on social media feeds, attempting to differentiate themselves from existing platforms; mainstream Web3/2 financial trading super apps such as Coinbase/Robinhood, supplementing their own trading types. 3) Customized tools for specific groups and needs in prediction markets, such as high-frequency trading, multi-platform arbitrage trading or aggregated trading terminals, LP mining or paid small group tools, and prediction market data and information aggregation and analysis platforms. 4) KOLs and rebate platforms, such as mobile trading platforms like Based and Phantom Wallet, as well as various social media-driven rebate KOLs or communities. Do not attempt to interfere with the user's normal betting experience. In existing discussions about leverage in prediction markets, there are two main trends: Gondor's approach, which involves diverting funds after betting, forcing users to stake their bets in DeFi. Regardless of liquidity management and APY calculations, simply changing the user's purpose is already doubly difficult, easily leading to a path of high-interest deposit-taking. Messari's Kaleb Rasmussen attempted to "price" the "jump risk" in prediction markets. As mentioned earlier, price changes in prediction markets can instantly return to 1 or 0. His mathematical explanation is brilliant, but its implementation in real-world financial engineering is extremely difficult. Based on existing practices, I boldly propose a simpler approach to achieving transparent leverage in DeFi without interfering with the user experience for founders to consider: a cross-market arbitrage mechanism similar to Taobao affiliate marketing, profiting between the prediction market audience and the DeFi audience. Use DeFi thinking to profit from "traffic," not traffic thinking to buy DeFi volume. The true value of prediction markets lies in accumulating funds, with clear maturity dates and corresponding asset reserves. If Polymarket wants to outperform Kalshi in terms of capital efficiency, its scale expansion has reached a certain limit. In other words, compared to trading assets, Wall Street and the crypto are currently in an irrational frenzy regarding information pricing. Whether it's TGE or IPOs, issuing stablecoins or building L1/L2, these are all expected and routine actions. Ahead of the uncertain TGE/IPO date, Polymarket's most certain need is to strengthen its surrounding ecosystem to boost trading volume and counter Kalshi. On-chain programmability and composability of funds are the key to Polymarket's external traffic generation. The biggest financial opportunity in 2026 lies in the cyclical fluctuations of the midterm elections and the World Cup. FIFA's appeasement of Trump and regulatory approval for DeFi and betting make it a truly pivotal year for finance.
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