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

Summary

• Polymarket's trading volume and active users are generally trending upward. The platform's data is not merely inflated by a few large whales, but user retention remains significantly influenced by hot topic cycles.

• The increase in fees and revenue stems from both trading demand and the gradual expansion of fee scope and changes to the fee structure since Q1 2026.

• Platform trading is highly concentrated in a few high-attention verticals like politics, sports, and geopolitics, while long-tail categories are temporarily unable to independently support overall liquidity.

• Polymarket possesses the characteristics of both an information market and a sentiment market, but currently functions more like an event trading venue activated during periods of high attention.

• Gate's prediction product is not a weaker copy of the on-chain version; it solves 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 historically high levels. The platform has evolved from an early on-chain experiment into an event market capable of handling large-scale trading volume for political, sports, macroeconomic, and geopolitical events.

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

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

Trading Volume and Activity

Polymarket's trading volume shows clear step-function growth. Monthly trading volume was only $38.9 million in April 2024, rising to $59.2 million in May; by October 2024, it had soared to $2.28 billion, further reaching $2.577 billion in November, and while it pulled back to $1.7 billion in December, it remained far above mid-year levels. Entering Q4 2025, the platform entered another acceleration phase, with monthly trading volume rising from $4.1 billion in October 2025 to $10.57 billion in March 2026. Looking purely at scale, Polymarket is no longer an experimental on-chain fringe 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 dynamics and the platform's capacity to handle volume. The significant surge from October to November 2024 was highly correlated with election-related trading; the new wave of volume growth from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026 was driven by a combination of sports, macro, financial, and geopolitical themes. The platform has shifted from "going viral due to one major event" to "rotating and succeeding across multiple high-attention themes."

Active user expansion has grown synchronously 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 mid-2025阶段性 decline, monthly active traders rebounded to 477,900 in October 2025, and the recent monthly active figure has reached 764,700. This means 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 is still strongly cyclical: when hot topics fade, platform retention declines, indicating that while the base is thicker, loyalty and daily need are not yet strong enough to fully offset the cycles of major events.

Overall, Polymarket's growth is relatively real, but its reality is closer to structural expansion atop event-driven surges. It has proven it can absorb traffic and convert it into trades during major information windows, but it has not yet fully proven it can maintain the same steep growth slope in the absence of strong narratives.

Fees and Revenue: A Cautious Interpretation of High Revenue

Compared to trading volume, Polymarket's fee data requires more cautious interpretation. Firstly, the fee structure itself has undergone institutional changes. According to official fee documentation, Polymarket uses a dynamic fee model that charges only the Taker, and different categories have different fee rates, with geopolitical and world events currently still at zero rate. This means Polymarket's fee growth is not just a function of demand growth but is also directly affected 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 capability.

A key fee inflection point occurred around the end of March 2026. Publicly verifiable data shows that Polymarket's gross protocol revenue for Q1 2026 was $16.23 million, while the trailing 30-day fee as of early April 2026 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's fee reached $6.8 million, and daily fees on April 1 even exceeded $1 million.

The fee scale for the last 30 days is close to the revenue level of the entire previous quarter. This certainly indicates strong trading demand on the platform, but the more important explanation is that a large volume of previously non-fee-charging event trading has been brought into the monetization system, causing a natural jump in the revenue curve. This cannot be simply interpreted 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 possession of sufficiently large event trading volume, while the latter is reflected in the gradual activation of the "monetization" switch. From a business analysis perspective, these two cannot be conflated. Extrapolating annualized revenue of hundreds of millions based solely on daily fees exceeding $1 million overlooks two real constraints: first, high fee rates may suppress high-frequency trading and market-making activity; second, the most attention-grabbing geopolitical markets remain at zero fee, meaning the platform's hottest traffic pool may not proportionally translate into protocol revenue.

Thus, what Polymarket's fee curve really indicates is that the platform has proven it can charge fees, meaning the business model is becoming viable. However, whether the platform can prove that high revenue can be stably replicated in the long term requires more time to observe the transaction structure, market-making subsidies, fee elasticity, and user reaction.

Market Structure and Event Concentration

Polymarket is far from a uniformly distributed broad-spectrum market. Politics, sports, and geopolitics alone account for 92% of the total volume across major categories. Including smaller categories like culture, economy, crypto, weather, and finance, the long-tail markets, while they exist, contribute extremely little to total volume.

Polymarket's core demand does not stem completely from the universality of "being able to price anything," but rather from a few high-attention, highly contentious, and frequently updated information verticals. Secondly, users are most willing to trade events with strong media transmission attributes and clear outcome nodes. Politics, sports, and geopolitics have long dominated precisely because these three themes simultaneously possess narrative intensity, information increment, and clarity of settlement. Thirdly, while the platform appears to be an open market, it is more akin to a collection of top-tier event markets. As long as leading themes continue to emerge, liquidity will aggregate; once there is a lack of sufficiently strong event supply, long-tail markets struggle to support overall turnover alone.

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 also become more dependent on the supply side. Polymarket has room for category expansion, but its current trading remains highly 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 flows.

Trading Behavior and Temporal Distribution

From a product intuition standpoint, prediction markets are often described as "information markets" because prices compress dispersed information into probabilities. On Polymarket, however, this definition may only partially hold true.

On one hand, weekends do not mean the platform is quiet. On a Sunday in January 2026, the entire prediction market saw a single-day trading volume exceeding $814 million, with Polymarket contributing approximately $127 million that day. Furthermore, during the geopolitical conflict trading window in March 2026, Polymarket, alongside other 24/7 crypto trading platforms, helped express risk during the closure of traditional markets. On the other hand, thin weekend liquidity is a real problem. In January 2026, there were cases of traders using thin weekend liquidity to attack short-cycle price markets. This suggests that Polymarket's weekend trading tends to exhibit an uneven structure of "sharp amplification when events occur, deep thinness when there are none."

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

Polymarket's Position in the Landscape

Polymarket is often compared with variants of three existing product types: DEXs, sports betting, and perpetual swaps. However, it is not entirely identical to any of them.

It is unlike a DEX because the traded objects are not general-purpose 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 is also unlike perpetual swaps because its core is not directional leverage and funding rates, but probability trading around specific events with a finite term.

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 are typically difficult to standardize for trading, into binary or multi-outcome contracts that can be quoted, matched, and exited midway. It does not replace spot or futures but provides the market with a new type of tradable object: future states of the world itself. For this reason, it is particularly adept at capturing attention during macro inflection points, election cycles, major sports tournaments, and geopolitical conflicts, as these scenarios naturally lend themselves to expressing differences in expectation through "probability prices."

This is also Polymarket's unique role within 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 will not be simply categorized as an ordinary exchange. However, as long as it is highly dependent on event flows, it will struggle to form completely stable daily demand like 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 within its App, offering both a "Prediction Mode" and a "Trading Mode." It supports participation via USDT in the exchange account, as well as via USDC on Polygon through a Web3 wallet. The key to this design is transforming the process, which originally required wallet, network, stablecoin, and on-chain interaction experience, into an account-based experience more akin to spot trading.

Centralized platforms are not creating a weaker on-chain copy; they solve 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, conversely, unifies funds, positions, orders, and settlement within the exchange account system, significantly lowering the learning curve. Second is access friction. For existing exchange users, entering the prediction market directly with USDT and their existing account is smoother than separately preparing a Polygon wallet and USDC. Third is liquidity organization. The on-chain market's advantage is open matching and access to external market makers, while centralized platforms excel at directly migrating their own user traffic, order book interfaces, charting tools, and trading habits to new products, shortening the cold start phase.

However, the advantages and disadvantages of on-chain vs. centralized are not symmetrical. Polymarket's strengths lie in verifiable on-chain positions, higher market openness, easier access for external developers and market makers, and a product that is naturally closer to the native form of information trading. Gate's advantages lie in lower educational costs, lower account switching costs, higher user conversion efficiency, making it more suitable for channeling existing spot and perpetual users into event trading. Their regulatory 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 prediction markets beginning to diverge into two distinct product pathways. Polymarket emphasizes on-chain openness and native information trading, while Gate-style products emphasize low-friction access, account integration, and conversion of existing users. Both will coexist in the long term across different user layers and regulatory environments.

Risks, Constraints, and Future Evolution Paths

The primary external constraint facing Polymarket remains regulation. In November 2024, French regulators pushed for its geoblocking in France. By April 2026, the CFTC publicly sued three states to assert federal jurisdiction over prediction markets. Taken together, these events show there is still no unified answer on whether prediction markets are more akin to derivatives, gambling, or information tools in different regions. If the platform continues to penetrate mainstream financial scenarios, this classification issue will directly affect accessible users, listable events, and permissible settlement frameworks.

Internal structural risks are equally unignorable. First is the risk related to adjudication and oracles. Although Polymarket uses clear rules and the UMA Optimistic Oracle for adjudication, complex events, ambiguous wording, and boundary conditions can still trigger disputes, and more disputes make it harder for users to rely on it as a low-friction tool long-term. Second is liquidity concentration risk. Current volume is highly dependent on top-tier events; when popular themes are scarce, the problem of insufficient depth in long-tail markets re-emerges. Third is fee instability. The platform has recently demonstrated its ability to charge fees but also revealed revenue's sensitivity to rule changes; excessively high fees or insufficient subsidies could cause market makers and high-frequency traders to cool down first. Fourth is uncertain user retention. Many users may come for a specific election, war, or tournament but may not necessarily stay after the hype 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 sustainable themes that are not single-burst events, and finding a more balanced structure between fees, market-making, and user experience. Only by achieving this can Polymarket evolve from a high-engagement 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 but an event trading platform that has formed real trading volume, real user expansion, and a real ability to charge fees. Second, its growth is not purely hype; active users and trading volume have indeed risen synchronously, indicating the platform's data is not solely inflated by a few whales. Third, it has carved out a clear and scarce position within Crypto: transforming future events themselves into tradable objects.

However, it has also yet to prove three other things. First, high trading growth does not automatically mean demand has become de-eventized; the platform remains deeply driven by political, sports, and geopolitical events. Second, the rapid increase in fees does not automatically prove that revenue can be stably annualized, as the expansion of the fee scope is itself 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 its having turned a previously difficult-to-trade object into a genuinely liquid market and demonstrating the potential for commercialization. Its boundaries lie in the fact that this market still highly depends on event supply, the regulatory environment, and user attention. Looking ahead, the on-chain native path and the centralized integration path represented by Gate are likely to continue existing: the former represents open information trading infrastructure, the latter represents lower-friction productized distribution channels. What is truly worth observing is who can first turn prediction markets from a hot product during peaks 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

• Gate, https://www.gate.com/zh/learn/articles/gate-integrates-polymarket-prediction-market-a-new-era-of-event