The CFTC's recent event contract proposal marks a turning point for prediction markets as a new financial asset class, argues Rashan Colbert. Legal classification will determine whether event contracts develop as gambling products or as legitimate event-risk infrastructure for institutions and protocols. Part one of a planned summer series from the former dYdX and Senate policy lead.

Galaxy Research breaks down Hyperliquid's HIP-4 protocol upgrade and positions it as the arrival of a third major prediction market model alongside Polymarket and Kalshi. Compares the three on infrastructure, fees, UX, oracle design, and regulatory posture across a 35-minute deep dive with live market data.

XO Labs publishes the first in a planned series on XO Vaults, a passive liquidity design that bridges the gap between CLOB platforms and pooled liquidity in prediction markets. It analyses three existing liquidity models and identifies a structural gap: platforms with best execution have no passive product, while platforms with passive deposits lack order-book execution. The article proposes a five-factor vault allocation algorithm with circuit breakers designed to protect against informed trading.

This is the most formal treatment of futarchy's microstructural challenges to date, modeling how selection bias and equilibrium multiplicity emerge from the joint information structure of action and outcome beliefs. The paper's central insight — that on-chain wallet transparency creates a cross-market welfare channel with a narrow interior optimum — has direct implications for how conditional prediction markets should be designed on blockchain venues.

Binary prediction markets compress continuous probability distributions into yes/no outcomes, discarding variance, skew, and tail information that forecasters naturally produce. functionSPACE analyzes 622 mutually exclusive bracket events on Polymarket and finds that less than half price a coherent probability distribution. The piece argues for continuous market design as the primitive that finally matches how both institutional analysts and prediction market traders actually reason about uncertainty.

taetaehoho runs an empirical analysis of Polymarket's liquidity rewards and sponsorships, finding they can tighten spreads only when daily spend exceeds roughly 1% of the existing book. Even above that threshold, incentive size barely predicts which markets respond; pre-existing liquidity conditions and pre-trends are far stronger determinants of uplift than reward intensity.

MO compares three market architectures for expressing shaped beliefs: binary prediction markets, options structures, and continuous prediction markets. The article traces the distribution gap from the Black-Scholes era through modern crypto markets and argues that continuous payout curves replace the workarounds traders currently use.

The first comprehensive empirical look at who actually profits on Polymarket and who doesn’t. Analyzing 588 million trades and $67 billion in volume, the paper finds the top 1% of users capture 76.5% of profits through disciplined limit order strategies, while the bottom 90% lose money taking liquidity with market orders. The authors also examine and ultimately rule out insider trading as an explanation for the largest winners’ performance.

Maps the prediction market landscape as a stack war between crypto rails (Polymarket), regulated rails (Kalshi), and execution wrappers (Coinbase, Robinhood). Argues the sector is stratifying into product archetypes rather than converging on a winner-takes-all outcome, with TradFi incumbents pushing standardized binaries that fit existing market structure.

Grace Deng from SevenX Ventures compares prediction markets against sports betting incumbents like DraftKings across product, business model, and legal dimensions. Parlay complexity gives traditional sportsbooks a structural advantage that orderbook-based platforms cannot easily replicate. The article argues that convergence rather than replacement will define the next phase—hybrid models where PMs and sportsbooks interoperate.