#预测市场 Seeing the prosperity of prediction markets over the past two years, I am reminded of how I felt during the heyday of BlackBerry and Yahoo. Superficial success can be most captivating, especially when the numbers look impressive—Kalshi claims an annual trading volume of 30 billion, and Polymarket continues to attract influxes of traffic. All of this can easily lead one to believe that everything is thriving. But having been in this industry for so many years, I’ve learned to look beyond appearances.

The real issue is that these platforms are trapped in a "local optimum" dilemma. They’ve found models that generate short-term traction but are unable to solve the fundamental problem of liquidity. Aside from top-tier markets like elections and Federal Reserve decisions, most trading pairs have extremely wide bid-ask spreads and are almost ignored. Market makers are even reluctant to trade—this alone highlights the severity of the problem. How much of the seemingly booming trading volume is actually fake transactions and artificially inflated incentives? Liquidity rewards like Polymarket’s incentives and Kalshi’s trading rebates are just blood transfusions for the product, not genuine solutions that align the product with market needs.

Structural flaws are even more deadly. Pure binary trading limits leverage and cannot provide the continuous trading experience of perpetual contracts. Jump risk cannot be addressed, and hedging mechanisms are missing—these are not issues that can be solved through subsidies or marketing alone. They require a fundamental redesign of the underlying protocols. I’ve seen attempts to use trading volume data to silence criticism, but traders who truly understand perpetual contracts have long seen through all of this. They should be the most sought-after users for these platforms, yet they are instead pushed away.

History repeatedly proves that when a company becomes intoxicated by short-term success and refuses to confront fundamental structural flaws, decline has already begun. The chaos of Infinex’s public offering is, to some extent, just a microcosm of this larger predicament—rules are repeatedly adjusted, confidence repeatedly damaged. The future of prediction markets is bright, but the current path is unviable. The real test is whether these teams have the courage to come down from the heights and rebuild themselves.