Much like crypto’s early evolution, the growth of prediction markets is no longer being measured solely by trading volumes or user numbers, but by the ecosystem forming around them. Prediction markets have increasingly attracted infrastructure providers, wallet operators, trading firms, data platforms, and media partnerships seeking to capitalize on a rapidly expanding market.
The trend was recently highlighted by the launch of PropMarket, a startup bringing the proprietary trading model to prediction markets powered by Polymarket.
The model, which mimics a forex and Contracts for Difference (CFD) prop firm playbook, lets traders pay for an evaluation and trade a simulated account against a 20% profit target while staying inside a 10% drawdown over 30 days. Passed traders receive a funded account that they can use to trade with on Polymarket.
“The increased interest from exchanges, prop firms, fintech platforms, market makers, and infrastructure providers is an important signal that prediction markets are moving beyond an experimental product category,” Charles Farrell, a Senior Managing Associate at Dentons US LLP, told DeFi Rate.
The prediction market ecosystem is shifting
PropMarket is not the only firm that is actively transforming the current prediction market landscape. For Traders also launched a prediction markets prop trading offering in beta in early March, and Mavin Trading claimed to have been the “first prop firm to launch prediction markets”.
“We’re watching the same pattern we saw with trading, staking, and payments: a capability that starts on dedicated platforms, then gets pulled into wallets and everyday finance products because users don’t want to context-switch,” Alvin Kan, the COO of Bitget Wallet, told DeFi Rate.
A similar pattern evolved in the cryptocurrency industry. Before decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregators, such as 1inch, wallet users had to manually visit individual exchanges, connect to separate platforms, and accept higher slippage from limited liquidity pools. Today, they can swap any token instantly at the best market rate through a single transaction that automatically routes and splits orders across multiple platforms. In fact, weekly wallet-based swaps reached around 20 million in 2025, ten times higher than in 2021.
“When major wallets and exchanges with combined user bases in the hundreds of millions embed the same functionality within months of each other, you’re watching a feature become infrastructure,” Kan said.
He added that the role of prediction markets specifically has shifted in a much broader financial sense as they increasingly function as real-time information and risk-management tools, with market probabilities shaping investor behavior and even influencing the news cycle itself.
Wallets as the access layer
That shift in function has made distribution just as strategically important as trading infrastructure. Bitget Wallet, for example, integrated Polymarket directly into its app and launched a World Cup campaign that brought over $1.2 billion in trading volume directly to the app’s 90 million users.
Speaking of the integration, Kan noted it removed the friction between having an opinion and acting on it with “Apple Pay funding, gas abstraction, and a mobile-first interface”.
“We also layered AI-powered analysis and smart money tracking, because access alone isn’t enough. Giving users signal alongside access is how casual participants become engaged ones.”
Alexander Briggs, Chief Trading Strategist at SuperTrader, sees the same dynamic playing out at the market structure level.
“[Prediction markets] provide a direct way to express a view on an event rather than its secondary economic consequences. That creates a unique form of market intelligence that many investors find valuable.”
Match-Trade Technologies has moved in a parallel direction on the broker side, plugging event-based trading into its Match-Trader platform as both a native feature and a standalone white-label product, the same infrastructure that already runs its forex and CFD systems, now pointed at event contracts. For existing brokers, that means adding prediction markets without having to rebuild their stack from scratch.
The ecosystem is running ahead of the rules
While the ecosystem is evolving fast, prediction markets continue to sit between gambling and derivatives regulation in many jurisdictions.
Farell has described that tension as the sector’s most significantly unresolved question.
“Over time, certain event contracts may become a more established part of the financial-market ecosystem. But whether prediction markets remain a specialized product category or develop into something broader will depend heavily on … regulatory treatment, market integrity, and evolving consumer protections,” he said.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) recently sued New Mexico after the state challenged Kalshi’s sports event contracts, deepening the fight over whether prediction markets fall under federal derivatives rules or state gambling law. The outcome of such cases could eventually do more to define the sector’s ceiling than any individual platform launch.
Farell added that the distinction between an emerging industry and a mature market primarily hinges on semantics; however, the transition between the two “will be marked by increased predictability”.
“… Responsible companies should be able to assess legal risk, build compliant products, and operate under rules that regulators and market participants understand.”
SuperTrader’s Briggs noted that the transition from emerging to mature will be visible in market behavior before it shows up in headlines.
“Mature markets tend to have deeper liquidity, tighter spreads, faster reactions to new information, and less susceptibility to large price swings caused by a handful of participants. When pricing consistently reflects available information and can absorb significant trading activity without major distortions … that’s a strong sign of maturity.”
The prop firms, brokers, wallets, and data providers building around prediction markets right now are betting those conditions arrive. It is a similar bet crypto’s infrastructure made before the rules had time to catch up, and whether prediction markets follow that arc all the way to institutional legitimacy may depend less on the platforms themselves than on the regulatory decisions still being written around them.
