Social platforms are engulfed by extreme rhetoric, with emotional incitement becoming the key to traffic. Ethereum founder Vitalik candidly pointed out on Farcaster: Costless exaggerated statements harvest attention, and only real monetary bets can force participants to return to true probabilities—prediction markets are precisely the 'coolant' for emotional public opinion.$BNB
This judgment is by no means a mere talk; it is a realistic footnote predicting the market's ten-year comeback. In the early years, due to technical barriers and ambiguous regulations, platforms like Augur were marginalized, trapped by high Gas fees on Ethereum L1, with the industry's TVL peak falling short of 7 million dollars; the 2024 U.S. election became a turning point, with Polymarket's single transaction volume soaring to 3.68 billion dollars, and in 2025, the total transaction volume across the board breaking through 27.9 billion dollars, with both Polymarket and Kalshi's valuations exceeding 10 billion. Now, L2 networks have reduced transaction costs to just a few cents, one-click betting with stablecoins lowers the entry barrier, and the CFTC's regulatory endorsement has attracted institutional investments in the range of 2 billion dollars, transforming the sector entirely.
The core emphasized by Vitalik is the 'interest-binding' mechanism of prediction markets. Unlike the zero-cost expressions on social platforms, every opinion here is anchored to USDC - a contract price between $0-1, essentially real-time pricing of event probabilities. From Trump's victory to the Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts, and the rankings of AI large models, hot topics can form rational consensus through long and short betting. When social platforms are flooded with slogans like 'Bitcoin will definitely break $150,000', the price fluctuations in prediction markets have already provided a rebuttal: emotional outbursts will inevitably distort, and the consensus of capital votes is closer to the truth.
Nowadays, prediction markets have become a new 'information hub': Bloomberg terminal connects data, quantitative funds track trends, and traditional polls refer to its probability feedback. It is neither a one-way output of traditional media nor a carnival of emotions on social platforms, but rather aggregates dispersed wisdom into real-time credible probability signals through 'dynamic trading + liquidity rewards', reducing speculative behaviors akin to 'passing the buck' and bringing the market back to real value judgments.$XRP
Indeed, the issues of vague event adjudication disputes and oracle manipulation risks remain to be resolved, but the value of this 'remedy' is undeniable. As emotional statements become more rampant, prediction markets constrain the irrational underlying logic with capital, becoming a rare rational outlet. From marginalized tracks to mainstream players with annual trading volumes in the hundreds of billions, the rise of prediction markets itself is the best proof: in an uncertain world, real-money bets are always more weighty than cost-free shouting.$ETH
