Prediction Markets Could Be DeFi’s Next Big Infrastructure Play As Kalshi, Polymarket, and Binance Build Ecosystems Around Crowd Intelligence
Snapshot:
- Kalshi, Polymarket, and a wave of DeFi-native protocols are quietly building financial micro-economies, complete with infrastructure, toolmakers, and data pipelines.
- The real contest is no longer over pop culture happenings and political outcomes. It’s about who builds the rails on which future forecasts will run.
At crypto’s edge, a new economic frontier is forming. Kalshi, Polymarket, and their on-chain rivals are moving beyond listing event contracts to seeding ecosystems, each vying to become a new kind of financial infrastructure based on predictive intelligence.
A thicket of analytics dashboards, automated liquidity providers, and AI-powered forecasting tools is emerging. The end game is a parallel information economy where crowdsourced probabilities, not pundits, do the talking.
Ecosystems, not exchanges
Polymarket launched its Builders program earlier this year to entice developers, analysts, and content creators to build new tools atop its protocol. More than a hundred have already appeared, ranging from trading bots and sentiment monitors to scrapers that scan social media for market-moving chatter.
Kalshi, keen not to be left behind, recently launched the KalshiEco Hub, offering grants, infrastructure support and marketing to new projects that expand its reach. Recent link-ups with Solana and Base let users deposit …
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