Gate Research: Prediction Markets Entering Mainstream Cycle, Gate Becomes Top3 Trading On-Ramp

Summary

• Prediction markets have entered the mainstream financial cycle. Platforms like Polymarket are experiencing sustained growth in trading volume and user activity, while traditional financial institutions such as ICE, Cboe, and Nasdaq are accelerating their布局. Event trading is becoming a significant branch of derivatives and information financialization.

• Gate is the first major trading platform to integrate Polymarket. Leveraging its 53 million global users, USDT on-ramp, spot and derivatives ecosystem, and an account-based agency trading model similar to Gate Alpha, it encapsulates complex on-chain prediction markets into a CEX-native event trading experience.

• Gate has become a Top 3 volume distribution channel for Polymarket, validating the critical value of CEX distribution capabilities for the expansion of prediction markets. This creates a mutually beneficial structure where Gate provides user and capital access, and Polymarket offers event markets and probabilistic pricing.

In the current evolution of the industry, prediction markets have gradually moved from niche on-chain applications into the mainstream financial spotlight. Since 2024, trading volume and user activity on on-chain platforms like Polymarket have surged; in March 2026, ICE, the parent company of the NYSE, announced an additional $600 million strategic investment in Polymarket, bringing its total investment to $1.6 billion; traditional exchanges like Cboe and Nasdaq have also launched event-driven contracts. Demand for trading events related to macro-politics, economics, AI developments, and crypto industry hotspots continues to grow. This trend indicates that the "future" itself is progressively becoming a tradable asset. Against this backdrop, Gate has taken the lead by integrating Polymarket, becoming the first major trading platform in the crypto industry to introduce prediction markets into a centralized exchange system.

As one of the world's top crypto trading platforms, Gate boasts significant advantages: a user base exceeding 53 million; a product ecosystem covering spot and futures with support for over 4,600 trading pairs; global reach and high trading activity. Leveraging these strengths, Gate seamlessly integrates prediction markets into its ecosystem, expanding its product line from the traditional "Spot + Futures" to "Spot + Futures + Event Trading." Gate is accelerating its transformation into the next-generation information financialization trading gateway for both retail and professional investors, seizing the initiative in event-driven financial innovation. Gate has currently become a Top 3 distribution channel for Polymarket.

I. Industry Trend: Prediction Markets Enter the Mainstream Financial Cycle

1.1 Rapid Market Expansion

Prediction markets have entered an explosive phase. Since the start of 2026, the notional trading volume of prediction markets has exceeded $20 billion for four consecutive months. In April 2026 alone, the monthly notional volume approached a new all-time high of nearly $30 billion. Sports events and political hot topics continue to attract trading activity, while other domains like pop culture, finance, and weather are also growing.

Simultaneously, institutional capital continues to flow in. The valuations of the two leading platforms, Polymarket and Kalshi, are climbing, exceeding tens of billions of dollars. The international regulatory environment is gradually loosening, with regulatory frameworks continuously evolving, and event contracts being more systematically included in regulatory discussions. Prediction markets are steadily becoming a global informational financial infrastructure.

1.2 Changing User Trading Behavior

The rapid expansion of prediction markets also reflects a shift in user trading logic.

For a long time, mainstream trading behavior in the crypto market has been similar to traditional finance, primarily revolving around asset price volatility: buying and selling mainstream assets like BTC and ETH; using leverage to amplify volatility returns; short-term trading around liquidity cycles, etc. The core focus was on trading the "price" itself, with market participants profiting by predicting price movements.

However, with the maturation of infrastructure like Polymarket, the objects of user trading are subtly shifting towards deeper driving factors such as policy directions, market narratives, AI technological progress, macroeconomic events, and regulatory changes. Users are no longer just trading the "price of the outcome" but are starting to directly trade the "outcome itself," essentially pricing the probability of future events.

Compared to using assets as proxies for expectations, prediction markets offer a more direct way to trade information, allowing event expectations to be priced and traded with极高的效率. This explains why prediction market users overlap significantly with traditional perpetual contract and options users. These are all high-frequency, high-information-density, and high-event-sensitivity trading groups. The difference is that traditional contract markets trade price volatility, while prediction markets trade future probabilities.

1.3 Convergence of Prediction Markets and Traditional Trading Markets

The financialization process of prediction markets is accelerating their deep integration with traditional trading markets.

From a product logic perspective, prediction markets exhibit distinct derivative-like characteristics. In traditional financial markets, futures are used to trade future prices, and options are used to trade volatility. Prediction markets, by their nature, trade the probability of future events occurring, thus can be viewed as a typical event-driven derivative. This means prediction markets are not a completely new species independent of the traditional financial system but an important new branch of the derivatives market.

At the same time, prediction markets restructure markets around events and expectations, granting them unique value and providing a novel price discovery mechanism. Unlike assets whose prices indirectly reflect various information, prediction markets can directly price event outcomes in real-time and with precision. This direct information pricing capability is the core reason prediction markets are attracting increasing attention from traditional financial institutions.

Under this trend, the role of centralized exchanges is also quietly transforming. In the past, the core competitiveness of CEXs focused on listing capabilities, liquidity depth, and contract trading capabilities. In a cycle dominated by prediction markets, new competitive dimensions are rapidly emerging, including the ability to operate around hot topics, handle and respond to high-frequency information, innovate in event trading products, and optimize the user experience for information trading.

Therefore, future trading platforms will no longer be limited to crypto asset exchanges but are expected to evolve into one-stop trading platforms encompassing crypto, TradFi, and future event trading. This is the profound strategic significance of Gate's current active布局 in prediction markets – to occupy the high ground in the era of information trading ahead of time, completing the upgrade from an asset trading platform to a comprehensive, one-stop trading platform.

II. Gate's Strategic Positioning and Product Advantages

Gate's integration of Polymarket leverages the user scale, account system, capital on-ramp, and trading infrastructure of a Top Tier CEX to transform the originally Web3-native prediction market into a CEX-native event trading experience directly accessible to ordinary trading users. In designing the product integration for prediction markets, the logic adopts a model similar to Gate Alpha's "agency trading / execution" model. This means users select events, determine direction, and place orders on the Gate frontend, while Gate handles the backend processes of accessing the underlying Polymarket markets, converting asset paths, executing orders, and displaying positions.

2.1 Gate's Foundational Advantages: Users, Liquidity, and Distribution Capability

Gate has over 53 million global users, covering more than 80 jurisdictions, supporting over 4,600 digital assets, and has formed a multi-asset product matrix including Spot, Futures, Earn, Web3, TradFi, and Pre-IPO. According to the CoinDesk Data exchange report from March 2026, Gate has become the world's third-largest centralized derivatives trading platform, with its derivatives market share increasing to 12%. Derivatives, futures, and high-frequency trading users are naturally characterized by high information sensitivity, high trading frequency, and strong event responsiveness, making them the core audience most easily converted to prediction markets.

More critically, Gate's advantages have been validated by actual distribution results. In the officially tracked Builder data, Gate has become a Top 3 trading volume distribution channel for Polymarket on both a weekly and monthly basis. On a recent single day, Gate even became the second-largest trading volume distribution Builder for Polymarket, achieving this feat just one and a half months after integration.

This result demonstrates that Gate has become a crucial entry point for Polymarket's incremental users and trading flow. Future competition in prediction markets will occur not only at the protocol layer but also at the distribution layer. Whoever controls users, capital, and trading scenarios will have a better chance of becoming the core traffic node for event trading.

2.2 Gate's Product Design Logic: Account-Based Agency Trading Model Similar to Gate Alpha

The long-standing barriers for on-chain prediction markets have been user onboarding, capital on-ramps, product standardization, and trading experience. Polymarket solves the market mechanism and on-chain settlement issues, but ordinary users still face friction points like wallets, networks, Gas, USDC, cross-chain interactions, and order execution when actually entering. Gate abstracts away this complexity, compressing the multi-step on-chain process into an in-account trading pathway.

Gate's prediction market design draws inspiration from Gate Alpha. Instead of directing users to jump to an on-chain DApp to complete trades themselves, Gate provides a standardized trading entry on the frontend and handles the underlying market access, asset path conversion, and trade execution on behalf of the user on the backend. What users see is an event trading interface within the CEX, while the backend is connected to Polymarket's prediction market liquidity and Yes/No share mechanism.

This model can be understood as an "in-account agency trading and execution" logic. Gate was one of the earliest CEXs to explore CEX-On-Chain connectivity. Gate Alpha provided mature and replicable experience, allowing users to directly participate in on-chain early-stage asset trading using USDT from their Gate accounts. Gate's prediction market product extends this logic, packaging the on-chain prediction market as an in-account tradable product. Users do not need to prepare their own wallet, handle cross-chain transactions, acquire Polygon USDC, or manage Gas fees, nor do they need to understand the intricacies of Polymarket's on-chain interactions. They simply need to select an event, choose a direction, and place an order within Gate.

It is easy to see that within this framework, Gate significantly optimizes the entry path. It is not just a reliable traffic routing entry but also a CEX-native encapsulation layer for prediction markets. Users make trading decisions on the Gate frontend, while Gate handles fund conversion, order routing, market interaction, and position display in the background, transforming Polymarket's originally Web3-native trading flow into the familiar account balance, order placement, position holding, and settlement experience for ordinary CEX users.

This is also the key reason Gate could become Polymarket's third-largest distribution channel. Prediction markets themselves have the foundation for event pricing and liquidity, but large-scale expansion relies on low-friction entry points. Through an agency trading mechanism similar to Gate Alpha, Gate encapsulates on-chain event trading into in-account event trading, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for users and improving the conversion efficiency from browsing events to actually placing orders.

2.3 Gate's Event Trading Experience: Dual-Mode Design and Ecosystem Integration

While preserving Polymarket's core mechanisms, Gate introduces a dual structure of Prediction Mode and Trading Mode. The Prediction Mode is suitable for new users to understand Yes/No probabilities and outcome payouts. The Trading Mode provides an order book, K-line charts, depth, and various order types, resembling the interface of futures and professional trading platforms.

Importantly, prediction markets will not be isolated from Gate's existing Spot, Futures, and TradFi products. Instead, they will act as leading signals in the user's decision-making chain. For example, if the probability of a Fed rate cut event rises rapidly, a user might simultaneously adjust their positions in BTC, ETH, gold, or US stock indices. If the probability of a geopolitical event changes, a user might concurrently monitor crude oil, gold, stablecoins, and safe-haven assets. If the probability of a specific crypto regulatory event changes, a user might also adjust their positions and contract strategies for related tokens.

Therefore, after integrating Polymarket, Gate's product structure has expanded from the traditional "Spot + Futures" to "Spot + Futures + Event Trading." This means Gate now not only accommodates movements in asset prices but also possesses the capability to host users' direct judgments on real-world events, macro trends, policy changes, and market narratives, thereby enhancing the information density and user trading chain across the entire ecosystem.

2.4 New Features: Evolving Beyond an Entry Point into an Event Trading Workstation

Gate's integration with Polymarket will not stop at the trading access level. It is continuously evolving towards an integrated event trading workstation encompassing event discovery, trade execution, asset management, and strategy tracking. A series of new features are being launched to further strengthen Gate's product advantage in the prediction market distribution layer. Gate is committed to helping users discover events faster, participate in events more efficiently, manage positions more clearly, and foster strategy discovery mechanisms through leaderboards and user profiles.

At the event discovery layer, Gate will launch more complete search and categorization capabilities. Users can quickly search for global hot events through fuzzy keyword matching, with search results supporting highlighted display. This is combined with features like smart recommendations, category browsing, real-time trending, recent browsing, and search history to reduce the cost of the path from "seeing a hot topic" to "finding the market." After adding a secondary category to the homepage, sections like Recommendations, Sports, and Crypto will be clearer, allowing users to quickly enter relevant event markets based on their interests.

Secondly, at the real-time opportunity capture layer, Gate will introduce a Breaking News section, aggregating significant news, sports updates, crypto market movements, and other high-attention events. The core trading opportunities in prediction markets often arise from information changes and rapid probability reassessments. Therefore, "discovering events in real-time" is itself a crucial part of the trading experience. The Breaking News section compresses event news, market heat, and the trading entry point into a single product path, helping users move faster from information assessment to trading action.

Third, at the trading category expansion layer, sports events will support more derivative markets, such as point spreads, over/under, and other play types, along with interactive features like sliding to select scores and clicking for quick order placement. Sports has always been one of the categories with the highest trading frequency and lowest user understanding cost in prediction markets. Users will not only trade win/loss outcomes but also more granular exposures like score ranges, spread results, and total points trends.

Fourth, at the asset and billing management layer, Gate will enhance historical classification and billing filtering functions. Users can view various fund change records including buys, sells, refunds, and claims, and filter them by transaction type, hiding small transactions or claimed market records. A clear billing system can significantly enhance user trust in fund flow, position changes, and the settlement process.

Fifth, at the strategy discovery layer, the leaderboard feature will introduce multi-dimensional rankings based on P&L, trading volume, highest profit, etc., and display key data such as position value, trading volume, highest profit, and total P&L.

These features collectively form the flywheel for Gate's prediction market product: Event Discovery → Hot Topic Recommendation → Fast Trading → Position & Billing Management → Leaderboard & Strategy Discovery → Trading Again.

III. Commercial Value: The Mutual Benefits for Gate and Polymarket

Gate's integration with Polymarket creates a mutually beneficial structure. Gate gains a new event trading scenario, increased user activity, and platform differentiation. Polymarket gains a CEX-level user gateway, a USDT capital channel, and a lower-friction trading conversion path. Gate has become Polymarket's Top 3 trading volume distribution channel, preliminarily validating the commercial闭环 of this partnership.

3.1 For Gate: Increased User Activity and Enhanced Platform as an Information Gateway

Unlike traditional cryptocurrency trading, prediction markets revolve around news, sports events, policies, and hot topics, making them inherently more time-sensitive and socially shareable. Users may not trade spot or futures every day, but they might check the probability of a popular event changing daily.

This product characteristic increases the frequency of opening the Gate App and enhances user reliance on Gate for information. Gate becomes not just a platform users open to place orders but also an information gateway where users check event probabilities, market sentiment, and global hot topics. Prediction markets bring Gate higher-frequency information consumption scenarios and longer user retention cycles.

3.2 For Polymarket: Access to CEX-Level Distribution and a USDT Capital On-Ramp

From a competitive landscape perspective, the next phase of competition in prediction markets is no longer just between underlying markets but is becoming a competition between combinations of prediction market infrastructure and large-scale distribution gateways. The partnership between Polymarket's biggest competitor, Kalshi, and Robinhood has already proven that mainstream trading gateways can significantly amplify user reach, trading conversion, and brand awareness for prediction markets. By embedding event contracts into its brokerage trading system, Robinhood brought Kalshi a broader retail user base, contributing to over 50% of its trading volume and propelling event trading from a niche product into a mainstream trading scenario.

The strategic significance of Gate for Polymarket lies precisely in supplementing its CEX-level distribution capabilities. While Polymarket originally possessed strong liquidity, event coverage, and user mindshare within the on-chain prediction market space, its incremental user acquisition was more Web3-native compared to Kalshi. Gate's integration provides Polymarket with a sufficiently large global crypto trading platform ally, enabling it to reach Gate's over 53 million global users, including a cohort of high-frequency, high-information-sensitivity derivatives and contract traders.

Therefore, Gate becoming Polymarket's third-largest distribution channel