Gate Research: Polymarket Accelerates Growth, Gate Positions Itself as a New Gateway to Prediction Markets

特邀专栏作者

2026-05-09 02:00

This article is about 6486 words, reading the full article takes about 10 minutes

Against the backdrop of political, sports, and geopolitical events continuously amplifying trading demand and the platform’s fee scope expanding in tandem, Polymarket’s trading volume and active users are showing structural growth driven by events. However, high revenues do not equate to long-term validation. Polymarket currently functions more as a trading market activated by high-attention events rather than a broadly diversified, general-purpose platform. Gate, leveraging its account system, low barriers to entry, and product integration capabilities, is entering the prediction market, offering an alternative, more easily convertible gateway beyond the native on-chain path.

AI Summary

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Core Insight: Polymarket has evolved from an early-stage on-chain experiment into an event-driven trading market with real trading volume and fee-generating capacity. However, its growth is heavily reliant on high-frequency events such as politics, sports, and geopolitics. The expansion of fees is also influenced by adjustments to fee rules, and it has yet to demonstrate the ability to generate stable, event-independent daily demand.
Key Elements:
1. Trading volume and active users are rising in tandem. In March 2026, trading volume reached $10.57 billion, with active users approaching 764,700. However, user retention is significantly affected by the cycles of trending topics.
2. Protocol revenue in Q1 2026 was $16.23 million, but fees over the last 30 days have already approached this level. This sharp fee increase is primarily due to the expanded fee scope at the end of March, not a doubling of demand.
3. The market is highly concentrated. Political, sports, and geopolitical categories account for 92% of total volume, making it difficult for long-tail categories to independently sustain liquidity.
4. Polymarket possesses characteristics of both an information market and a sentiment market. Its price discovery mechanism is only activated in high-attention scenarios, exhibiting an imbalanced liquidity structure on weekends.
5. Positioned as an “event derivatives market,” Polymarket serves information expression and attention monetization. It is fundamentally different from DEXs, sports betting, and perpetual contracts.
6. Integration by centralized platforms like Gate addresses issues of on-chain wallets, entry friction, and user conversion. Consequently, prediction markets are diverging into two paths: on-chain open markets and centralized integration.

Summary

• Polymarket's trading volume and active users are generally rising in tandem. The platform is not just inflating data with a few large whales, but retention is still clearly influenced by hype cycles.

• The increase in fees and revenue is driven by both trading demand and a gradual expansion of the fee scope and changes to the fee structure since the first quarter of 2026.

• Platform trading is highly concentrated in a few high-attention verticals like politics, sports, and geopolitics. Long-tail categories cannot independently sustain overall liquidity for now.

• Polymarket possesses attributes of both an information market and a sentiment market, but currently, it functions more like an event trading venue activated during high-attention windows.

• Gate's prediction product is not a weaker on-chain replica but solves different problems in account integration, onboarding friction, user conversion, and product distribution.

Introduction

As of April 2026, Polymarket's trading volume and fees are both at historic highs. The platform has evolved from an early on-chain experiment to an event market capable of handling large-scale trading flows in political, sports, macroeconomic, and geopolitical events.

The core of this article is not to re-explain what a prediction market is, but to answer four more specific questions: First, is Polymarket's growth truly structural? Second, is the expansion of fees and revenue driven by demand or by rule changes? Third, what are users actually trading? Fourth, why are top exchanges like Gate starting to integrate prediction products into their trading systems?

Based on these questions, this article will deconstruct the Polymarket prediction market through data, comparisons, analysis, and judgement.

Trading Volume & Activity

Polymarket's trading volume shows a clear step-up pattern. In April 2024, monthly trading volume was only $38.9 million, rising to $59.2 million in May. By October 2024, it surged to $2.28 billion, further reaching $2.577 billion in November. Although it declined to $1.7 billion in December, it remained significantly higher than mid-year levels. Entering the fourth quarter of 2025, the platform entered another acceleration phase. Monthly trading volume from October 2025 to March 2026 rose from $4.1 billion up to $10.57 billion. Looking purely at scale, Polymarket is no longer an experimental on-chain niche product but has formed an event trading market comparable to some mature trading scenarios.

Polymarket's growth curve is a typical result of the combined effect of event-driven activity and the platform's execution capacity. The sharp increase from October to November 2024 highly resonated with US election-related trading. The new wave of volume growth from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026 was driven by a combination of sports, macroeconomic, financial, and geopolitical themes. The platform has shifted from "going viral from a single major event" to a "relay race of multiple high-attention themes."

The expansion of active users has grown in tandem with trading volume. In July 2024, the platform had only 41,300 monthly active traders, which rose to 293,700 in November 2024, and reached 462,600 in January 2025. After a temporary decline in mid-2025, the number of monthly active traders rebounded to 477,900 in October 2025, and recently reached 764,700 on a trailing-month basis. This indicates that Polymarket's volume growth has been accompanied by a continuous expansion of its user base. However, the activity data also clearly shows that user expansion remains strongly cyclical: when the hype recedes, platform retention drops, suggesting that while the base is thicker, loyalty and daily usage needs are not strong enough to completely offset major event cycles.

Overall, Polymarket's growth is relatively real, but its authenticity is closer to a structural expansion built upon event shocks. It has proven it can absorb traffic during major information windows and convert it into trading volume, but it has not yet fully proven it can maintain the same steep growth slope when strong narratives are absent.

Fees & Revenue: A Cautious Interpretation of High Revenue

Compared to trading volume, Polymarket's fee data requires more careful interpretation. Firstly, the fee structure itself has undergone institutional changes. According to the official fee documentation, Polymarket employs a dynamic fee model charging only the Taker, with different rates for different categories; geopolitical and world events currently maintain a zero fee rate. This means Polymarket's fee growth is not just a function of demand growth but is also directly impacted by the expansion of the fee scope and adjustments to the fee structure. Annualizing the fee curve directly can easily misinterpret rule changes as a permanent improvement in business capability.

A noticeable jump in fees occurred around the end of March 2026. Publicly verifiable data shows Polymarket's gross protocol revenue for Q1 2026 was $16.23 million. As of early April 2026, the trailing 30-day fees had reached $14.75 million, with trailing 30-day revenue at $10.36 million. After expanding the fee scope on March 30, the first full week saw fees of $6.8 million, and daily fees on April 1 briefly exceeded $1 million.

The fees from the last 30 days are approaching the revenue level of the previous full quarter. While this certainly indicates strong trading demand on the platform, the more important interpretation is that a large volume of previously untraded events were brought into the monetization system, causing a natural jump in the revenue curve – this cannot be simply understood as an overnight doubling of underlying demand.

Therefore, the current high fees are driven by both demand and rule changes. The former is reflected in the platform's sufficient event trading flow, while the latter manifests in the gradual flipping of the "monetization" switch. From a business analysis perspective, these two factors cannot be conflated. Simply extrapolating daily fees over $1 million into an annualized revenue of hundreds of millions overlooks two practical constraints: First, higher fee rates may suppress high-frequency trading and market-making activity. Second, the most attention-grabbing geopolitical markets still have zero fees, meaning the platform's hottest traffic pool may not proportionally translate into protocol revenue.

So, what the Polymarket fee curve truly indicates is that the platform has proven it *can* charge fees, meaning a business model is taking shape. However, whether the platform can prove that high revenue is sustainable and replicable over the long term will require more time to observe the transaction structure, market-making subsidies, fee elasticity, and user responses.

Market Structure & Event Concentration

Polymarket is far from being an evenly distributed, broad-spectrum market. Politics, sports, and geopolitics alone account for 92% of the total trading volume across major categories. If smaller categories like culture, economy, crypto, weather, and finance are included, it's evident that while long-tail markets exist, their contribution to total trading volume is extremely limited.

The core demand for Polymarket does not stem from the universal applicability of "being able to price anything," but rather from a small number of high-attention, high-controversy, high-frequency information verticals. Secondly, users are most willing to trade events with strong media propagation attributes and clear resolution dates. Politics, sports, and geopolitics dominate because these three types of themes simultaneously possess narrative intensity, high information density, and clear settlement. Thirdly, although the platform looks like an open market, it more closely resembles a collection of top-tier event markets. As long as leading themes continue to emerge, liquidity concentrates; once the supply of sufficiently strong events diminishes, long-tail markets struggle to sustain overall volume independently.

This may also present some structural risks. Highly concentrated markets are often better at forming depth and price discovery efficiency for hot events, but they are also more dependent on the supply side. While Polymarket has room for category expansion, actual trading still heavily relies on a few thematic pools. This means its sustainability, besides user growth, depends on the platform's ability to continuously launch new, tradeable, and resoluble high-attention event streams.

Trading Behavior & Temporal Distribution

From a product intuition perspective, prediction markets are often described as "information markets" because prices compress dispersed information into probabilities. However, on Polymarket, this definition may only be partially true.

On one hand, weekends don't mean the platform is dormant. On one Sunday in January 2026, the entire prediction market saw over $814 million in daily trading volume, with Polymarket contributing around $127 million. During the geopolitical conflict trading window in March 2026, Polymarket, alongside other 24/7 crypto trading platforms, handled risk expression during traditional market closures. On the other hand, thinner weekend liquidity is a real issue. In January 2026, there were cases of traders exploiting thin weekend liquidity to impact short-cycle price markets. This suggests Polymarket's weekend trading exhibits an unbalanced structure of "sharp expansion during events, thin depth without them."

Therefore, a more accurate assessment is that Polymarket possesses dual attributes of both an information market and a sentiment market, but in its current phase, the characteristics of a sentiment amplifier are very pronounced. It can rapidly compress news, opinions, public sentiment, and odds into trading prices – this is the information market side. However, its high dependence on hot events, propagation rhythms, and collective narratives means it is not a purely rational information aggregator. In other words, Polymarket's price discovery function is currently mainly activated in high-attention scenarios.

Polymarket's Position in the Landscape

Polymarket is easily compared to three existing product types: DEX variants, sports betting, and perpetual contracts. However, it is not entirely identical to any of them.

It is unlike a DEX because the trading objects are not generic assets but conditional outcomes of discrete events. It differs from traditional betting because on-chain positions can be freely transferred before settlement, with the price itself carrying continuous probability changes. It is also unlike perpetual contracts because its core is not directional leverage and funding rates, but finite-duration probability trading centered around specific events.

A more suitable positioning is to view Polymarket as an "event derivatives market" or "information trading market" within crypto. It transforms macro, political, sports, and sentiment events – which were previously difficult to standardize for trading – into binary or multi-outcome contracts that can be ordered, matched, and exited midway. It doesn't replace spot or futures but provides the market with a new type of tradeable object: the future state of the world itself. Consequently, it particularly attracts attention during macro inflection points, election cycles, major sports events, and geopolitical conflicts, as these scenarios are naturally suited for expressing divergence in expectations through "probability prices."

This is also Polymarket's unique role in the crypto ecosystem. It primarily serves information expression, attention monetization, and event risk pricing, rather than asset allocation. As long as this function exists, it won't be simply categorized as an ordinary trading platform. However, as long as it remains highly dependent on event flows, it will struggle to form the completely stable daily demand seen in mainstream spot or perpetual markets.

Observations on Gate's Prediction Market Product

Gate's entry precisely illustrates that prediction markets have entered the product expansion logic of trading platforms. According to Gate's official announcement, Gate has integrated a Polymarket entry point in its App, offering both "Prediction Mode" and "Trading Mode" interactions. It supports participation via USDT within the exchange account and via USDC through a Web3 wallet on Polygon. The key to this design is transforming a process that previously required wallets, networks, stablecoins, and on-chain interaction experience into an account-based experience closer to spot trading.

Centralized platforms are not creating a weaker on-chain copy; they are solving a different set of problems. First is Custody and Account Systems. Polymarket's native path emphasizes self-custody and on-chain settlement, with advantages in openness, transparency, and composability. The Gate-style entry unifies funds, positions, orders, and settlement within the exchange's account system, significantly lowering the learning curve. Second is Onboarding Friction. For existing exchange users, directly entering the prediction market with USDT and existing accounts is smoother than preparing a separate Polygon wallet and USDC. Third is Liquidity Organization. The on-chain market's strength lies in open matching and external market maker access, while centralized platforms are better at directly migrating their own user traffic, order book interfaces, charting tools, and trading habits into new products, shortening the cold start period.

However, the pros and cons of on-chain vs. centralized are not symmetrical. Polymarket's advantages lie in verifiable on-chain positions, higher market openness, easier access for external developers and market makers, and a product that feels closer to the native form of information trading. Gate's advantages are lower education costs, lower account switching costs, higher user conversion efficiency, making it more suitable for directing existing spot and futures users into event trading. Their compliance boundaries also differ. On-chain platforms often emphasize open infrastructure and global liquidity, while centralized platforms emphasize managing product visibility and usage paths based on region and account systems.

Therefore, the significance of Gate's prediction market product is that it signifies the prediction market starting to diverge into two distinct product paths. Polymarket emphasizes on-chain openness and native information trading, while Gate-style products emphasize low-friction access, account integration, and existing user conversion. Both are likely to coexist long-term in different user layers and regulatory environments.

Risks, Constraints, and Future Evolution Paths

The primary external constraint Polymarket faces remains regulation. In November 2024, French regulators pushed it to implement geoblocking in France. By April 2026, the CFTC publicly sued three states to maintain federal jurisdiction over prediction markets. These two events together indicate there is still no unified answer across different regions as to whether prediction markets are more akin to derivatives, gambling, or information tools. Should the platform continue to penetrate mainstream financial scenarios, this classification issue will directly impact reachable users, listable events, and applicable settlement frameworks.

Internal structural risks cannot be ignored either. The first is Adjudication and Oracle Risk. Although Polymarket uses clear rules and UMA's Optimistic Oracle for adjudication, complex events, ambiguous wording, and edge cases can still trigger disputes. The more disputes arise, the harder it is for users to use it as a low-friction tool long-term. The second is Liquidity Concentration Risk. Current volume is highly dependent on top-tier events. When hot themes are scarce, the problem of insufficient depth in long-tail markets re-emerges. The third is Fee Instability. The platform has recently demonstrated its ability to charge fees, but this also reveals the sensitivity of its revenue to rule changes. If fee rates are too high or subsidies insufficient, market making and high-frequency trading may cool down first. The fourth is User Retention Uncertainty. Many users might come for a specific election, war, or tournament but may not stay after the hype fades.

The key to future evolution lies in whether the platform can transform event trading from recurring peaks into a more stable trading habit. This requires simultaneously solving three problems: improving the quality of market creation and settlement, expanding beyond single-outbreak sustainable themes, and finding a more balanced structure between fees, market making, and user experience. Only by achieving this can Polymarket evolve from a high-attention application into a more durable product category.

Conclusion: Polymarket's Current True Value & Boundaries

Undeniably, Polymarket has already proven three things. First, it is not a flash-in-the-pan on-chain experiment but an event trading platform that has formed genuine trading scale, real user expansion, and actual fee-charging capability. Second, its growth is not purely fictional; active users and trading volume have indeed risen concurrently, indicating the platform isn't just propped up by a few whales. Third, it has carved out a clear and unique position within crypto by turning future events themselves into tradeable objects.

However, it has also not yet proven three other things. First, high trading growth does not automatically mean demand has become de-coupled from events; the platform remains deeply driven by political, sports, and geopolitical events. Second, rapidly rising fees do not automatically prove that revenue can be stabilized on an annualized basis, as the expansion of the fee scope itself is a significant variable. Third, it has not yet proven itself to be a universal, low-volatility, high-retention long-term product form; it remains a highly efficient market apparatus within windows of high information density.

Therefore, Polymarket's true value lies in transforming a class of previously hard-to-trade objects into a market with genuine liquidity and demonstrating the possibility of commercialization. Its boundaries lie in the fact that this market remains highly dependent on event supply, the regulatory environment, and user attention. Looking ahead, both the on-chain native path and the Gate-style centralized integration path will likely continue to coexist: the former represents open information trading infrastructure, while the latter represents lower-friction productized distribution channels. What truly warrants continued observation is who can first turn prediction markets from a hot product during peak times into a regular trading category.