Polymarket has been in the spotlight this week, with a lot of talk surrounding the prediction platform. It’s gaining recognition as ICE XEM a $9 billion deal and Wall Street is keeping an eye out.
In this context, the network effect is spreading across different chain and protocols, powering its decentralized prediction markets.
Altcoin Stacks Fuel Polymarket's Boom Moment
BeInCrypto recently reported that Polymarket could be hosting the industry’s largest Airdrop . This, coupled with headlines about a potential investment from ICE , puts a number of altcoins in a position to benefit from the platform’s surge in value.
1. UMA: The Silent Platform of Prediction Markets
UMA is important to Polymarket, but no one is paying attention. While all eyes are on Polymarket's explosive growth, UMA remains the quiet infrastructure layer that makes decentralized oracles possible.
Polymarket uses UMA 's Optimistic Oracle (OO) to verify market outcomes transparently. This decentralized data verification mechanism allows proposers and claimants to determine the truth on chain, without relying on any central authority.
“Polymarket supports UMA as a settlement source for markets displayed on the Polymarket.com interface. Polymarket, at its core, is oracle-agnostic, but integrating UMA provides an additional option for Market Maker,” the platform Chia in a recent blog post.
Behind the scenes, UMA 's oracle ensures that any prediction, whether about elections, markets or sports, can be settled securely and trustlessly.
The UMA-CTF adapter deployed on Polygon connects Polymarket's conditional Token framework (CTF) with the UMA oracle, making every market decision verifiable.
Despite this important Vai , investors have largely overlooked UMA, focusing on the success of Polymarket’s interface. If sentiment shifts to recognizing the importance of oracles, UMA could see significant growth as the need for on chain data verification increases.
UMA Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto2. Polygon (Matic): Chain supply chain for Polymarket
Polymarket operates entirely on Polygon 's Proof-of Stake network , benefiting from low-cost and high-speed infrastructure. The platform's recent integration with X (Twitter) has brought over 600 million users into on- chain prediction markets, and thus, the Polygon ecosystem.
Polygon 's upcoming upgrades (PIPs 60 and 43 ) promise to increase throughput to 1,000 TPS and reduce completion times to around 5 seconds, directly improving the user experience for prediction markets.
According to Polygon Labs, these upgrades will enhance transaction capabilities for applications like Polymarket, RWAs, and payments, cementing Polygon as the leading chain for consumer-scale cryptocurrency use cases.
“Polymarket’s success is a win for Polygon, Ethereum, and the entire crypto ecosystem,” said Josh Stark, who works with the Ethereum Foundation.
3. Ethereum (ETH): The payment layer behind it all
Indeed, Ethereum is crucial to Polymarket's story, Vai as the foundational layer that makes its existence possible.
“Polymarket [couldn’t] exist without native Ethereum USDC with EVM wallet from 2020,” said Nick Tomaino.
Polymarket's reliance on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ensures access to the industry's deepest developer resources, tools, and security infrastructure.
USDC integration on Ethereum also facilitates seamless settlement for prediction markets.
As Ethereum's Layer-2 ecosystem expands , including rollups like Katana, applications like Polymarket have more scaling options.
Stark predicts that this symbiotic relationship between Ethereum and its L2s will soon make building on the EVM the “obvious choice” for future breakthrough applications.
The rise in Polymarket's value is not only a win for its investors, including CEO Shayne Coplan ; but also a validation of the entire Ethereum- Polygon- UMA system.
While attention has focused on the front-end platform, the deeper value may lie in the protocols that provide Trustless logic and its scalability.
As prediction markets become more popular, these three altcoins could quietly become the biggest beneficiaries of Polymarket's growth.
