Ignas: Polymarket Trading Volume Stagnates, Active Wallets Decline, Pivot to Perpetual Contracts Comes as No Surprise

Odaily reports that DeFi researcher Ignas has stated that it is not surprising to see prediction market platforms like Polymarket expanding into perpetual contracts (Perps). Despite the recent high interest in the U.S. midterm elections, Polymarket's active wallet count, open interest (OI), and transaction count are all trending downward.

Ignas pointed out that Polymarket's user base consists primarily of speculators, and election-related trading volume is far lower than that of sports and cryptocurrency markets. Therefore, perpetual contracts are attractive to Polymarket, as they can further extract revenue from speculative users. However, Polymarket should focus more on improving its prediction market products rather than entering the perpetual contracts space, leaving this sector to platforms such as Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Variational. Additionally, Ignas noted that due to the current prevalence of wash trading on Kalshi, he is not considering including data from that platform for now.