#预测市场 After reading this article, I have to say— the current situation of the prediction market really reminds me of the stories of BlackBerry and Yahoo. Those companies made the same mistake early on: being dazzled by superficial prosperity and refusing to admit they had fallen into a local optimum trap.

Prediction markets are doing the same thing. Looking at platforms reporting an annualized trading volume of $30 billion sounds impressive, right? But a deeper look reveals that these numbers are highly inflated. Most trading volume is concentrated on a few popular events, while long-tail markets are painfully sparse, and the bid-ask spreads are as wide as a chasm. Genuine liquidity simply does not exist.

They are now maintaining this illusion through subsidies, incentives, and cashback—essentially, spending money to buy users into the product. I’ve seen this path too many times; once subsidies stop, everything will be exposed. The most frightening part is that these platforms haven't even seen the root of the problem: the structure of binary options itself is a bottleneck, with no leverage, no hedging, and extremely low capital efficiency.

If they continue to stick to this model and keep embellishing the numbers, they will eventually be overtaken by a new player willing to completely overhaul the system, perhaps by adopting perpetual contract designs. The problem is, they are now numb to these warnings because they are blinded by their own "success." That’s the most dangerous part—winning the wrong game without even realizing it.