Gate 研究院：Polymarket 增长加速，Gate 布局预测市场新入口
Abstract
• Polymarket's trading volume and active users are generally trending upward in tandem, indicating the platform isn't merely inflating data with a few large whales. However, user retention remains notably influenced by the cycles of high-profile events.
• The rise in fees and revenue stems from both increased trading demand and the gradual expansion of fee scope and adjustments to the fee structure that began in the first quarter of 2026.
• Trading activity on the platform is heavily concentrated in a few high-attention verticals such as politics, sports, and geopolitics, with long-tail categories currently unable to independently sustain overall liquidity.
• Polymarket possesses characteristics of both an information market and a sentiment market, but currently functions more like an event-trading arena activated during periods of high attention.
• Gate's prediction product is not a weakened copy of an on-chain version; rather, it addresses different problems related to account integration, access friction, user conversion, and product distribution.
Introduction
As of April 2026, Polymarket's trading volume and fees are at historical highs. The platform has evolved from an early on-chain experiment into an event market capable of handling large-scale trading flows related to politics, sports, macroeconomics, and geopolitical events.
The core of this article is not to reiterate what prediction markets are, but to answer four more specific questions: First, is Polymarket's growth truly structural? Second, is the expansion of fees and revenue demand-driven or rule-driven? Third, what are users actually trading? Fourth, why are top exchanges like Gate beginning to integrate prediction products into their trading systems?
Based on these questions, this article will deconstruct the prediction market Polymarket through data, comparison, explanation, and judgment.
Trading Volume and Activity
Polymarket's trading volume shows a clear step-wise upward trajectory. Monthly trading volume was just $38.9 million in April 2024, rising to $59.2 million in May; by October 2024, it had surged to $2.28 billion, further reaching $2.577 billion in November. Although it fell back 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 steadily from $4.1 billion 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 established trading scenarios.
Polymarket's growth curve is a typical result of the combined effect of event-driven catalysts and the platform's capacity to handle the resulting traffic. The sharp increase from October to November 2024 highly resonated with election-related trading. The new wave of volume expansion from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026 was driven jointly by topics like sports, macroeconomics, finance, and geopolitics. The platform has shifted from "relying on one major event for a breakout" to "a relay race of multiple high-attention themes."
Active user expansion has grown in sync with trading volume. In July 2024, the platform had only 41,300 monthly active traders, which increased to 293,700 by November 2024 and reached 462,600 in January 2025. After a period of decline in mid-2025, monthly active traders rebounded to 477,900 in October 2025, and currently stands at 764,700 on a recent-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 spotlight fades, platform retention declines. This suggests that while the base is thicker, loyalty and daily necessity are not yet strong enough to fully offset the cycles of major events.
In summary, Polymarket's growth is relatively genuine, but its authenticity is closer to structural expansion built upon event-driven shocks. It has proven its ability to absorb traffic and convert it into trades during major information windows, but it has not yet fully demonstrated the capability to sustain the same steep growth trajectory in the absence of compelling narratives.
Fees and Revenue: A Cautious Interpretation of High Revenue
Compared to trading volume, Polymarket's fee data requires more careful interpretation. First, the fee structure itself has undergone institutional changes. According to official documentation, Polymarket employs a dynamic fee model that charges only Takers, and rates vary by category. Geopolitics and world events currently maintain a zero rate. This means that Polymarket's fee growth is not solely a function of demand growth but is also directly influenced by the expansion of the fee scope and adjustments to the fee structure. Annualizing the fee curve directly can easily misinterpret rule changes as permanent improvements in operational capacity.
A key juncture for fees occurred around the end of March 2026, showing a clear jump. Publicly verifiable data indicates that Polymarket's gross protocol revenue for Q1 2026 was $16.23 million. As of early April 2026, 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 generated $6.8 million in fees, and daily fees on April 1 briefly exceeded $1 million.
The fee scale over the last 30 days is close to the entire previous quarter's revenue level. This certainly indicates strong trading demand on the platform. However, a more critical interpretation is that a large volume of event trades that were previously free are now being monetized. This naturally causes a jump in the revenue curve, which should not be simply understood as a sudden doubling of underlying demand.
Therefore, the current high fees are driven by both demand and rules. The former is reflected in the platform's sufficient event trading traffic, while the latter is reflected in the gradual turning of the "monetization" switch. From a business analysis perspective, these two factors cannot be conflated. Simply extrapolating from a single day of over $1 million in fees to an annualized revenue of hundreds of millions overlooks two real constraints. First, higher fees might compress high-frequency trading and market-making activity. Second, the most attention-grabbing geopolitical markets remain zero-fee, meaning the platform's hottest traffic pools may not proportionally translate into protocol revenue.
Thus, what Polymarket's fee curve truly proves is that the platform has validated its ability to charge fees, indicating a viable business model is emerging. However, whether the platform can prove that this high revenue can be stably replicated over the long term requires more time to observe the trade composition, market-making subsidies, fee elasticity, and user reaction.
Market Structure and Event Concentration
Polymarket is far from being a uniformly diversified, broad-spectrum market. Politics, sports, and geopolitics alone account for 92% of the total trading volume in major categories. When smaller categories like culture, economy, crypto, weather, and finance are included, it becomes clear that while long-tail markets exist, their contribution to total trading is extremely limited.
The core demand for Polymarket doesn't fully stem from the universality of "being able to price anything," but rather from a few high-attention, high-controversy, and frequently updated information verticals. Secondly, users are most willing to trade events with strong media propagation attributes and clear outcome nodes. Politics, sports, and geopolitics dominate precisely because these three themes simultaneously possess narrative intensity, information increment, and settlement clarity. Thirdly, while the platform may look like an open market, it functions more like a collection of top-tier event markets. As long as headline topics continue to emerge, liquidity will aggregate. Once the supply of sufficiently strong events dries up, long-tail markets alone struggle to sustain overall trading volume.
This might introduce some structural risks. Highly concentrated markets are often better at forming depth and price discovery efficiency for hot events, but they also become more dependent on the supply side. Polymarket has room for category expansion, but its actual trading remains heavily reliant on a few thematic pools. This means its sustainability, besides user growth, also depends on the platform's ability to continuously launch new, tradable, and settleable high-attention event streams.
Trading Behavior and 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 hold partially true.
On one hand, weekends don't mean the platform is dormant. On a Sunday in January 2026, the entire prediction market recorded over $814 million in daily trading volume, with Polymarket contributing about $127 million. During the geopolitical conflict trading window in March 2026, Polymarket, along with other 24/7 crypto trading platforms, absorbed risk expression during traditional market closures. On the other hand, thin 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 that Polymarket's weekend trading tends to exhibit an unbalanced structure: "dramatically amplified during events, deeply thin in their absence."
Therefore, a more accurate assessment is that Polymarket possesses a dual nature of both an information market and a sentiment market. However, in its current phase, the sentiment amplifier characteristic is very prominent. It can rapidly compress news, opinions, public sentiment, and odds into trading prices – this is the information market side. But its heavy reliance on hot events, dissemination rhythms, and collective narratives determines that it is not a purely rational information aggregator. In other words, Polymarket's price discovery function is currently activated mainly in high-attention scenarios.
Polymarket's Market Positioning
Polymarket is easily compared to three existing product variants: DEXs, sports betting, and perpetual swaps. However, it is not identical to any of them.
It's unlike a DEX because the traded 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 prices themselves carrying continuous probability changes. It's also unlike perpetual swaps because its core is not directional leverage and funding rates, but finite-term probability trading around specific events.
A more fitting positioning is to view Polymarket as an "event derivatives market" or "information trading market" within the crypto space. It transforms macro, political, sports, and public sentiment events—which are difficult to standardize and trade—into binary or multi-outcome contracts that can be quoted, matched, and exited mid-way. It doesn't replace spot or futures markets but provides a new tradable object: the future state of the world itself. For this reason, it is particularly adept at capturing attention during macro inflection points, election cycles, major sports events, and geopolitical conflicts, as these scenarios are naturally suited for expressing expectation divergence through "probability prices."
This is also Polymarket's unique role within the crypto ecosystem. It doesn't primarily serve asset allocation, but rather information expression, attention monetization, and event risk pricing. As long as this function exists, it won't be simply categorized as a regular trading platform. However, as long as it remains highly dependent on event flows, it will struggle to form completely stable daily demand like mainstream spot or perpetual markets.
Observation of Gate's Prediction Market Product
Gate's entry precisely illustrates that prediction markets have entered the product expansion logic of exchanges. According to Gate's official announcement, Gate has integrated a Polymarket entry point into its App, offering both "Prediction Mode" and "Trading Mode" interactions. It supports USDT participation under the exchange account, as well as USDC participation via a Web3 wallet on Polygon. The key design here is transforming a process that previously required a wallet, a specific network, 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, offering openness, transparency, and composability. Gate's entry point unifies funds, positions, orders, and settlement within the exchange's account system, significantly lowering the learning barrier. Second is access friction. For existing exchange users, entering prediction markets directly with USDT and their existing account is smoother than preparing a separate Polygon wallet and USDC. Third is liquidity organization. The on-chain market's strength lies in open order matching and external market maker access. Centralized platforms are better at migrating their own user traffic, order book interfaces, charting tools, and trading habits directly to new products, shortening the cold-start period.
However, the advantages of on-chain and centralized models are not symmetrical. Polymarket's strengths lie in verifiable on-chain positions, a more open market accessible for external developers and market makers, and a product that is naturally closer to the native form of information trading. Gate's strengths lie in lower educational costs, lower account switching costs, higher user conversion efficiency, making it more suitable for importing existing spot and contract 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 regional and account systems.
Therefore, the significance of Gate's prediction market product should be understood as the beginning of prediction market differentiation into two product paths. Polymarket emphasizes on-chain openness and native information trading, while Gate-like products emphasize low-friction access, account integration, and existing user conversion. Both are likely to coexist in the long term across 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 for a geoblock in France. By April 2026, the CFTC publicly sued three states to assert its federal jurisdiction over prediction markets. These two events together highlight that there is still no unified answer to whether prediction markets are more akin to derivatives, gambling, or information tools across different regions. If the platform continues to penetrate mainstream financial scenarios, this classification issue will directly impact accessible users, listable events, and the applicable settlement frameworks.
Internal structural risks cannot be ignored either. First is the risk of dispute resolution and oracles. Although Polymarket uses clear rules and the UMA Optimistic Oracle for dispute resolution, complex events, ambiguous phrasing, and boundary conditions can still lead to controversies. The more disputes arise, the harder it is for users to view it as a low-friction tool for long-term use. Second is the risk of liquidity concentration. Current trading heavily depends on headline events. If popular themes become scarce, the problem of insufficient depth in long-tail markets will re-emerge. Third is fee instability. The platform has recently demonstrated its ability to charge fees but has also revealed revenue sensitivity to rule adjustments. If fees are too high or subsidies insufficient, market making and high-frequency trading may cool down first. Fourth is the uncertainty of user retention. Many users may come for a specific election, war, or tournament but may not stay after the excitement fades.
The key to future evolution lies in whether the platform can transform event trading from a series of peaks into a more stable trading habit. This requires solving three problems simultaneously: improving the quality of market creation and settlement, expanding the range of sustainable themes that are not single-explosive events, and finding a more balanced structure between fees, market-making, and user experience. Only by achieving this can Polymarket potentially evolve from a high-attention application into a more durable product category.
Conclusion: Polymarket's Current True Value and Boundaries
Undeniably, Polymarket has proven three things. First, it is not a fleeting on-chain experiment; it has formed an event trading platform with real trading volume, real user expansion, and a real ability to charge fees. Second, its growth is not purely speculative hype; active users and trading volume have indeed risen in tandem, indicating the platform is not just inflating data with a few whales. Third, it has carved out a clear and scarce position in the crypto space by transforming future events into tradable objects.
However, it has also not yet proven three other things. First, high trading growth does not automatically mean demand has become independent of events; the platform is still heavily driven by political, sports, and geopolitical events. Second, the rapid rise in fees does not automatically prove revenue can be stably annualized, 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 mechanism within high information density windows.
Therefore, Polymarket's true value lies in successfully creating a liquid market for a class of objects that were previously difficult to trade and demonstrating the potential for commercialization. Its boundary lies in the fact that this market remains highly dependent on event supply, the regulatory environment, and user attention. Looking ahead, both the native on-chain path and the centralized integration path represented by Gate will likely continue to exist. The former represents an open information trading infrastructure, while the latter represents a lower-friction productized distribution channel. What is truly worth watching is who can first turn prediction markets from a peak-season hot product into a normalized trading category.
References
• DeFiLlama, https://defillama.com/protocol/polymarket
• Polymarket Docs, https://docs.polymarket.com/trading/fees
• Blockworks Analytics, https://blockworks.com/analytics/polymarket/polymarket-overview/polymarket-trading-volume
• Dune, https://dune.com/kosard/polymarket-wallet-tracker
