🔶 Recently, I have clearly felt that the prediction market sector is starting to heat up.

It's not just the crypto circle playing now; even macroeconomics, political elections, sports events, and even uncertain events in the tech industry are directly transformed into trading markets. Participants express their judgments through trading, and prices fluctuate with trading volume, gradually forming the market's expected distribution of future outcomes.

I spent some time reviewing this track and finally focused on three currently most representative projects: Polymarket, Kalshi, Opinion. Why these three? Quite straightforward—they each represent three different paths currently being explored in prediction markets.

Let's start with the essence of prediction markets. Actually, what they do isn't complicated: an event that hasn't happened yet allows everyone to express their stance through buying and selling. The price changes in real-time, ultimately sedimenting into the market's expectation at a specific point in time. This price reflects the strength and flow of market consensus, not an absolute certainty of the outcome.

The differences between these projects mainly hinge on three key points:

- The composition of participant sources
- The regulatory environment of platform operation
- Who ultimately uses these price signals

First, let's look at Polymarket. This is a decentralized prediction market that has been operating for years, with a substantial global user base and a wide coverage of events—politics, macroeconomics, financial markets, crypto assets, sports, social topics—all can find corresponding trading pairs.