Akash Kumar Jha

Everyone’s trying to build the next Polymarket. Most of them are selling you a script.
As corny as this may sound, I’ve been obsessed with prediction markets for years not because they’re interesting technology (they are), but because they are the only financial primitive that turns collective human opinion into a price.
Every other market prices things you can hold, touch, or own. Prediction markets price what we believe will happen.
That’s a fundamentally different kind of infrastructure.
(My articles are long. If you don’t have 5 minutes right now, save this. You’ll want to read all of it.)
In 2026, the prediction market volume will have crossed $325 billion annually.

Polymarket handles $3.3 billion a month.Kalshi is valued at $11 billion.
And the race to own a piece of that infrastructure — to be the platform where the next election, the next Bitcoin peak, the next major world event gets priced, has never been more intense.
Founders are looking for a Polymarket clone to launch their own niche. Developers are evaluating codebases for contract quality. And traders are looking for edges that the giants haven’t yet priced in.
But here’s what most people searching for a Polymarket clone get wrong.
They think they’re looking for a script. They’re not. They’re looking for an ecosystem — oracles, liquidity mechanics, resolution logic, fee architecture, all working together without blowing up on launch day.
A prediction market is not a website with betting buttons. It is a coordination layer for human belief.

Build it wrong, and it collapses under its own weight.
That’s what makes our clone different. Not a clone script sold by a dev agency. A live, deployed Polymarket-style decentralized prediction market on Solana — with real USDC markets, real users, Fast Markets resolving via Pyth Network, and a 1:1 payout mechanism built for mathematical fairness.
Here’s everything you need to know — including the things the internet hasn’t told you about what actually separates prediction market platforms that work from the ones that quietly disappear.
Why Prediction Markets Matter More Than Ever
Let me speed-run the history, because it matters more than most people realize.
Humans have always needed a way to price the future.
In the foraging era, the best hunter made the call.In the agricultural era, priests and oracles held that power.In the industrial era, newspapers, analysts, and central banks replaced them.In the information age, social media gave everyone a voice, but with zero accountability.
You could be completely wrong and pay no cost for it.
Prediction markets are what happen when the information age finally meets financial incentives.
The market doesn’t care what your opinion sounds like. It only cares whether you’re willing to put money behind it.
Polymarket proved this at scale during the 2024 US election. It didn’t just predict the result — it predicted the shifts hours before any media outlet covered them.
93% accuracy across 2,500 contracts.

Not because the algorithm was smart. Because people who knew something put capital on it, and the price moved accordingly.​
In other words, prediction markets are the most reliable truth-seeking machine humanity has built yet, or whoever owns this infrastructure in the next decade is going to matter enormously.
For a founder, this is a $500B sector projected by 2028 that is still in early innings,For a developer, it is a smart contract challenge with solved primitives you can build on top of.For a trader, it is an arbitrage ecosystem with documented 3–8% yield spreads between platforms.
And all three of these people are searching for the same thing: a Polymarket clone they can trust.
What Makes our Polymarket Clone Script Different from Every Other Clone
Most Polymarket clone scripts give you the interface. Our clone gives you the infrastructure.
Here’s what separates it from the clone scripts currently ranking on the first page:
Solana-Native Architecture

While most clones run on Ethereum (high fees) or Polygon (fragmented liquidity), our Polymarket Clone is built directly on Solana.
Sub-second transaction confirmations.Fees that don’t punish retail traders.
For founders: your liquidity doesn’t die at $5 gas fees, and for developers: you’re working in one of the most developer-mature ecosystems in Web3.​
2. Dual Market Types: Standard + Fast Markets
Standard markets cover politics, sports, business, culture, technology, crypto, DeFi, and NFTs — long-form prediction with real-world event resolution.
Fast Markets are short-term, real-time speculation on rapid events: “Will Bitcoin be above $115,312 at 9:15 PM tonight?”
Fast Markets use Pyth Network live price feeds, so resolution is fully on-chain, verifiable, and tamper-proof.
This is what platforms like Limitless attempted, so we built it natively on Solana.
2.1 Payout Mechanism
No house edge or hidden rake.When a market closes, winners receive exactly what the losing side contributed, weighted by probability.The math is public, and the smart contracts execute it automatically.This is the structure Polymarket built its reputation on, and our Kalshi clone implements it cleanly.
2.2 USDC-Native with Automatic Local Currency Swap
All markets settle in USDC regardless of what you deposit. BRL, local fiat, other tokens — the platform handles the swap automatically at current rates.
For founders building in Latin America, Southeast Asia, or emerging markets with volatile local currencies, this is the feature that unlocks real user adoption without complex on-ramp friction.
2.3 Intelligent Sliding-Scale Fee Structure
Instead of flat fees that punish one side of the market, Triad scales fees by share price:
Low-probability positions ($0.10–$0.90): 3.8% feeHigh-probability positions ($0.91–$0.99): 0.9% to 1.9% (sliding)Win fee: only 0.36% on profits — never on the principal or on lossesNet result: traders keep almost everything they earn; fees are invisible at normal trading sizes
Sector Coverage — Politics, pop culture, business, sports, technology, cryptocurrencies, DeFi, NFTs.
More sectors than any comparable Solana-native prediction platform currently available.
How our platform works: Step-by-Step guide From Wallet to Payout
This is the full prediction market experience on our Klashi Clone. Whether you’re a complete beginner or a sophisticated trader, the flow is the same.
(In other words: it’s designed so that a 22-year-old first-time DeFi user and a veteran prop trader can both navigate it without asking for help.)
Step 1 — Connect & Fund

Connect your Solana wallet (Phantom, Backpack, Solflare).Deposit using any supported currency — the platform auto-converts to USDC at the current rate.No manual bridging, no multi-step swaps, no CEX intermediary required.
Step 2 — Find a Market

Browse across sectors.Standard markets show expiration dates tied to real-world events.Fast Markets show explicit resolution timestamps (e.g., “resolves at 9:15 PM tonight based on BTC/USD price”).
Step 3 — Read the Probability

The YES share price is the crowd's probability.A YES share priced at $0.70 means the market collectively assigns a 70% chance to that outcome.
This price is your signal. Your edge is finding markets where the price is wrong.
Step 4 — Take Your Position

Buy YES or NO. The price adjusts in real time as demand flows in. You’re not betting against the house, you’re betting against every other participant in that market.
Step 5 — Trade Before Resolution
You don’t have to hold to expiry. If your position appreciates before the event resolves, you can exit for profit.
This is where experienced traders generate alpha, not just correct predictions, but correctly timed exits before resolution.
Step 6 — Oracle Resolution
For Fast Markets:
Pyth Network provides the exact price at the exact resolution moment.One price, one moment, fully on-chain, not disputable.
For standard markets:
verified external data determines the outcome and triggers the smart contract.
Step 7 — Automatic Payout
Smart contracts execute instantly after resolution. No manual withdrawal queue. or platform discretion. Winners receive proportional payouts minus the 0.36% profit fee and losers lose their principal and nothing more.
Pros and Cons (The Honest Version)
I’ve quit more projects than I’ve shipped. So when I say something works, I mean it has survived contact with reality.
Here’s where our Polymarket clone model genuinely wins and where you need clear eyes.
WHAT WORKS
1.Speed on Solana:
During high-volume events (elections, major crypto moves), Ethereum-based clones experience congestion and failed transactions. Whereas Solana’s throughput means markets function exactly when they matter most.​
2. Fee Transparency:
The sliding fee structure rewards balanced markets. At high-probability prices, fees compress — encouraging traders to participate even in near-certain outcomes rather than sitting out.
3. Dual Market Depth:
Fast Markets with standard markets cover both short-term crypto traders and long-form event speculators. Most Polymarket clones serve one type, but our solution serves both in one interface.
4. Pyth Oracle Integration:
Pyth Network is one of the two most reliable real-time data oracles in production DeFi. For Fast Markets especially, this removes the human discretion layer from resolution entirely.
5. Mathematical Fairness:
The payout structure has no extraction mechanism beyond the explicit fee schedule. Every dollar that enters the market comes back out to the correct side, minus disclosed fees only.
6. Customization Architecture:
For founders, the underlying platform supports custom sectors, regional fiat swap integrations, white-label branding, and custom token ecosystems if needed.
WHAT TO WATCH
1.Solana Network Risk: Solana has experienced historical outages. For founders targeting institutional clients with SLA requirements, this is a genuine technical conversation to have upfront.​
2. Liquidity Cold Start Problem: Every new prediction market faces thin liquidity in niche markets at launch. Bootstrapping the orderbook requires either a user acquisition strategy, market-maker incentives, or both. Infrastructure alone doesn’t solve this.
3. USDC-Only Settlement: USDC simplifies operations significantly, but excludes yield-bearing collateral models (like ForecastEx’s ~4% interest on holdings) and multi-asset settlement architectures.​
4. Regulatory Jurisdiction: Prediction markets occupy complex legal territory. The CFTC is actively developing new rulemaking in 2026. Founders launching for US users especially need legal counsel before going live, this is not optional.​
What Founders, Devs, and Traders Must Understand
(This is the section most “clone script” sellers skip entirely. They shouldn’t. You need to hear it.)
For Founders:
The biggest risk is not technical. It’s liquidity.
Polymarket has $400M in open interest because of brand trust accumulated over the years and active market-maker relationships that took time to build.
A clone with perfect technology and no liquidity strategy will fail quietly.
Our 1:1 pool model specifically reduces the AMM bootstrap problem but even then, you need a user acquisition strategy before launch, not after.​
The secondary risk is jurisdiction. Know which regulatory model you’re building before you spend a dollar.
Regulated prediction markets (Kalshi-style) require CFTC licensing.Decentralized markets (Polymarket-style) operate in grayer territory.
Your legal structure shapes every product decision downstream.​
For Developers:
Smart contract bugs are permanent in a way server bugs are not.
The history of DeFi contains dozens of technically brilliant platforms that were financially destroyed by a single contract vulnerability.
Demand audited contracts.
Ask specifically how resolution logic is isolated from oracle data inputs.Ask what the fallback mechanism is if a Pyth feed has a disruption during a Fast Market resolution window.
These are the questions that matter, not what the UI looks like.
Key pattern to look for in a Polymarket clone architecture: oracle data should never be manually injectable post-resolution.
If the architecture allows human override of an oracle result, the integrity of every market on the platform is compromised.
For Traders:
Thin liquidity markets are manipulation vectors.
A single large position in an illiquid market can dramatically shift price, creating false probability signals that less-experienced traders then trade against.
Position sizing discipline matters differently in prediction markets than in spot crypto , you are pricing belief with real stakes, so price dynamics behave unlike any asset you’ve traded before.
Know the full fee math before entering a position.
At a $0.70 YES price with a 3.8% entry fee, your effective break-even probability is different from nominal.
Run the calculator before you size up.
But we’ve missed something critical.
All of these risks exist for Polymarket. For Kalshi. For every prediction market platform currently operational.
The question is never whether the risks exist — it’s whether the infrastructure handles them better or worse than available alternatives.​
A well-built Polymarket clone with Pyth oracle integration, audited smart contracts, and a transparent fee structure is materially safer infrastructure than an unaudited fork of a GitHub repo that someone repackaged as a clone script.
That distinction is why our solution is not in the same category as the other results you’ve seen while searching.
Want to Build Your Own Polymarket Clone?

Here’s what most people entering this search don’t understand about the timing.
The prediction market infrastructure race is not over. It has barely started.
$325B in annual volume.$9–15B platform valuations.CFTC rulemaking imminent.Robinhood and Interactive Brokers are mainstreaming the sector to retail users who’ve never touched crypto.
The window to enter as an operator is not closing — it is actually widening into niches, the giants are too large or too regulated to serve efficiently.
Local prediction markets.Sector-specific platforms (sports-only, DeFi-native, regional politics).B2B corporate forecasting tools.Enterprise risk hedging platforms.Creator-economy prediction markets where audiences trade on outcomes specific to a community.
These aren’t theoretical. They are the next layer being built right now, and the infrastructure needed to run them is already deployed.
The three paths look like this:
Level 1 (NPC): Wait for a major player to fully dominate, then compete for scraps from their leftovers.
Level 2 (Player): Build your own platform from scratch. Spend 12–18 months and $500K+ before a single real user trades on it and learn by expensive failure.​
Level 3 (Creator): Start with proven infrastructure — audited contracts, working oracle integrations, live USDC mechanics, a dual-market architecture, and build the product layer that serves a specific niche nobody currently owns.
That is our Prediction Market clone. Not a script you decode alone. A live prediction market platform built on Solana, deployed with real users, with documented architecture and a fee structure already calibrated for trader retention.
The founders who move in the next 12 months will own the niches that the next founders wish they had seen earlier.
What Happens Next
Our Clone is live. Not a prototype or waitlist.
A functioning decentralized prediction market on Solana with USDC markets across eight sectors, Fast Markets resolving on verified Pyth data, and a fee structure visible before you commit a single dollar.
The next 18 months will produce the prediction market infrastructure that prices the next decade of human decisions.
Don’t be the person who was watching when you could have been building.
→ Explore our Polymarket clone live: triadmarkets.com
→ Inquire about your custom Polymarket clone: https://t.me/akash_kumar107
→ Book a technical walkthrough: Product Development Consultation with Akash Kumar Jha
— Akash

Hey - yeah, you. I know the struggle. You’re scrolling LinkedIn, X, job boards… thinking, Will I ever land that Web3 role that actually matters? I get it.
I’ve been there.
That’s why I am building @hireincrypto — a no-fluff, real-deal Web3 job aggregator.
We’re not here to spam you with random listings or recruiter BS. Every role we share comes straight from company's career pages or official posts.
No recruiters. No smoke.
Just verified jobs you can actually apply for today.

You can get all the jobs in detail here Telegram: View @hireincrypto
What’s Hot Right Now
We just pulled 88 fresh roles across Web3 - think:
CTOs & Executive Roles at high-growth crypto startups and derivatives platformsEngineers & Developers in Blockchain, Rust, Solidity, AI/ML, and trading infrastructureGrowth, BizDev, and Ops roles — yes, there’s space for non-tech people tooRemote & Global — US, LATAM, EMEA, Dubai, India, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Canada
Top Salary Highlights:
CTO (Derivatives Platform): $300K–$400K base, $700K–$1M+ total compSr. Software Engineer (Gauntlet): $185K–$225KAI Lead Engineer (OP Labs): $180K–$250KJava Blockchain Developers: $160K–$250K+
We know Web3 is intimidating.
But here’s the thing: you don’t need to be perfect, you just need to start.
And starting with the right opportunities - ones you can actually nail, is how you win.
88 Fresh Web3 Jobs (Feb 18–20, 2026)
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) — Confidential Derivatives PlatformSenior Software Engineer (Trading Infra) — GauntletJava Developer (Blockchain/Smart Contracts) — ConfidentialAI Lead Engineer — OP LabsCorporate Development Manager — CircleChief Marketing Officer (iGaming) — Van KaizenHead of Finance & Treasury — Van KaizenVIP Account Manager — Van KaizenAffiliate Manager — Van KaizenHead of Business Development — Trust WalletCustomer Service Agent (Card Payments) — Beyond the SavannahBizDev / Lead Generation Manager — WenAltseason LabsSocial Media Manager — Crypto Fintech PlatformChief Technical Officer — DeFi StartupContent Writer (LinkedIn / X) — Agency Co-Founder BrandLaunch Manager — Peace Through Trade (PTT Coin)Account Director — TRM LabsDevOps Engineer — SimpleCrypto Trading Content Writer — TradingBrowserData Analyst (Economics) — Chainlink LabsSenior Backend Engineer (Rust) — Stealth AI Trading PlatformSr Graphic Designer & Video Editor — Shyamal MalikBlockchain Developer — KavodaxProduct Manager (AI x Web3 Security) — NethermindFull Stack Engineer — Goldmedia TechSupport Engineer II — QuickNodeRecruiters (Junior/Mid/Senior) — NƎƎDEDFull-Stack Engineer — Strider (LATAM)Front-End Engineer (React) — Fintech Crypto CompanySenior Business Development Manager — EASYMMAffiliate Mobile Marketing (Intl Sales) — VservHead of IT Security — Cybersecurity Services ClientFullstack Rust Developer — Jaya TalentSenior Rust Engineer — Solana DeFi InfrastructureSenior Communication Designer — MercuryoDigital Asset Acquisition Strategist — ConfidentialHead of Growth — Next-Generation Web3 WalletCustomer Service Agent — Trust WalletCompliance Officer (Thailand) — DarkexL2 Application Support Engineer — PegasyssoftSr ICT Market Research Consultant — ToolsPaid Traffic Manager — Strider (LATAM)Database Administrator — Strider (LATAM)Solutions Engineer — Strider (LATAM)Accounts Payable/Receivable Associate — Strider (LATAM)Systems Engineer (Python/Blockchain) — Top US CompaniesBusiness Development & Sales — Aarambh LabsFounding Full-stack Engineer — Top US CompaniesStaff AI/ML Engineer — On-Chain Analytics CompanySenior Python Engineer — Crystal Intelligence B.V.Backend Engineer — Whetstone ResearchMultiple C-Level & Exec Roles (CEO/CFO/COO) — Sissy Lei SearchInstitutional Sales Manager (MENA) — BinanceGlobal Headhunter Associate — Ilker Yavuz AksakalBackend Engineer — Mex Digital (MultiBank Group)Remote QA Engineer — Mex Digital (MultiBank Group)Senior DevOps Engineer — Alex Staff AgencyProduct Manager (Trading Platform) — Calyx ResourcesSenior Backend Engineer / Architect — SatschelSenior Frontend Engineer / Architect — SatschelProduct Manager — SatschelProposal Writer (US Federal) — IntellectFacesRust Engineer (Trading) — KeyrockNon-Technical Roles (BD, Ops, Marketing) — Solana EcosystemCommercial Account Executive — ChainalysisOTC Sales & BD Manager — Leading Crypto WalletSenior Data Engineer — ParadexData Engineer — Dubai Fintech Startup (Remote)Wallet Developer (Java) — ABFinanceFiat Product Manager — ABFinanceWeb3 Product Manager — MLabs LTDData Engineer (2-6 yrs) — Aquis SearchOperations Specialist — Fintech / PaymentsRuby on Rails & Blockchain Developer — RemoteFounding Full-stack Engineer — Top US CompaniesBlockchain Engineer (Indexers) — Remote (Solana/EVM)Senior Solidity Engineer — MLabsBack End Developer — CyreneAISenior Software Engineer (Frontend) — PhantomSenior Social Media Strategist — Kinesis MoneySenior Data Scientist — CoinbaseProduct Data Analyst — BitMEXSenior Software Engineer (Generalist) — Anza (Solana Labs)Technical Lead (GPU/Compute) — Impossible CloudSenior Engineers (Java/C++/AI) — Remote + NYGrowth Manager — Global B2BIT Staffing Partners — The IT TalentSenior Node.js Developer — MicroslushQuant Researcher — Crypto Trading FirmSenior Blockchain DevOps Engineer — MLabs
You don’t have to scroll endlessly, spam recruiters, or worry if the role is real.
We’ve done the hard part - finding the verified Web3 jobs that actually matter.
📌 Join our Telegram for all links & info: t.me/hireincrypto
This is real. These are real companies. And yes, one of these jobs could be yours if you take action.
#Web3Jobs
#CryptoJobs
#BlockchainJobs
#RemoteJobs
#Web3Careers
#HireinCrypto

I've spent the last week going through 173 web3 funding rounds totaling $1.48 billion deployed between September 2025 and February 2026.

Areas where investors are funding in lasy 6 months
Not reading about them. Going through them - investor by investor, stage by stage, vertical by vertical, asking one question over and over:
What is the market actually betting on?
(My articles are long. Bookmark it if you're short on time. This one is worth reading slowly.)
Because here's the thing most people miss when they look at funding data: they see numbers. I see a map of what humans think comes next.
Every dollar deployed is a belief about the future.
And when you aggregate 173 of those beliefs across 22+ active VCs and $1.48 billion in capital, a pattern emerges that most people - even people deep inside crypto, can't see because they're too close to it.
What I found confirmed some things I already suspected.

And it shattered a few narratives I had been carrying around without realizing it.
If you've been building, investing, or watching this space from the sidelines, wondering when to move - what I found matters to you more than most things you'll read this week.
I. A Quick History of How Money Gets Its Upgrade

Every time the economic base of civilization changes, money changes with it.
Foragers didn't need much.Reputation was currency.Agrarian societies invented grain receipts and coined metal
You needed a portable store of value to trade across distances.
The industrial economy gave us central banks, fractional reserve lending, and the stock market because factories needed capital pools bigger than any family could provide.
The informational economy gave us credit cards, wire transfers, and PayPal, because atoms were moving slower than bytes.
Here's the pattern that nobody talks about: the coordination layer for money always lags the production layer by one full generation.
We invent a new way of creating value first. Then slowly, messily, with a lot of failed experiments along the way, we invent the new way of accounting for and moving that value.
We are now in the intelligence age. AI is restructuring who produces what, how fast, and for whom.
Global, borderless, millisecond-fast value creation is now the default for millions of people, and the existing financial rails were literally designed for a different world.
That's not a crypto pitch.
That's just what the data says.
The $1.48 billion didn't go to speculation.
It went to the teams building the new coordination layer for this world. And that is the thing most people in this space are still not seeing clearly.
II. What the 2021 Cycle Got Wrong And Right
The last cycle produced millionaires and wreckage in roughly equal proportion.
The millionaires came from the correct intuition: the world needs new financial infrastructure, and getting there first creates asymmetric returns.
The wreckage came from a fundamental misread of the mechanism.
The 2021 era funded the idea that you could bootstrap a financial system with token inflation.
Yield farms.Liquidity mining.TVL as a vanity score.
If your protocol's revenue went to zero the moment token emissions stopped, it was not a protocol, it was a Ponzi with better branding.
The conformist in that cycle - Level 1
saw the price chart going up and joined the narrative someone else told them.They called themselves builders because they forked an AMM.
The individualist — Level 2
built for status and token speculation.Launch a protocol, attract TVL, the token goes up, and exit to retail.Smart, cynical, and ultimately self-defeating.It burned credibility for the whole category.
The synthesist — Level 3
was asking something different entirely: what infrastructure does the world actually need regardless of which narrative is hot this week?
Those are the teams getting funded now.
And the data makes it unmistakably clear.
III. The Six Bets the Smart Money Is Making Right Now

Let me show you exactly what I mean - across all six verticals getting capital right now.
Bet One: Prediction markets are a new asset class.
Kalshi raised $300M in October 2025, then another $1B in November - backed by Sequoia, a16z, and CapitalG.Polymarket received a $2B strategic investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.
Together: $3.3 billion to two prediction market companies inside a 6-month window.
Stop and sit with that number.
That is more than double the disclosed VC funding across the entire 173-round dataset.
Think about what the ICE investment signals specifically.
The organization that runs the NYSE looked at Polymarket and said: This is infrastructure. Not gambling. Not a crypto toy.
Infrastructure for how humans coordinate around uncertain futures.
Prediction markets are not a finance story. They are a meaningful story. In a world drowning in information and short on calibrated conviction, prediction markets turn belief into price.
And that price turns out to be extremely useful - more accurate than polls, more liquid than traditional betting, now with regulatory clarity in the US.
The infrastructure layer around prediction markets is wide open.
Oracles, settlement, compliance, vertical-specific platforms for biotech, climate, sports, politics - aggregators, probability data APIs, B2B risk pricing tools.
Kalshi and Polymarket are the core exchanges.
Everything around them is not built yet.
That is the opportunity.
Bet Two: Stablecoins are the internet of money, and the plumbing is being installed right now.
Rain raised $250M (ICONIQ, Dragonfly, Lightspeed).Zero Hash closed $104M from Morgan Stanley and Apollo.Fnality raised $136M from Temasek and Tradeweb. RedotPay did $107M Series B.
The investors in those rounds are not crypto-native.
Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley. Apollo. BNY Mellon.
These are the firms that run the existing financial rails and they are selecting their on-chain payments infrastructure partners right now.
Not in five years.
Now.
This is a winner-takes-most market, and the window to be part of that build is open for maybe another 12 to 18 months before consolidation.
The SME layer companies doing $1M to $50M a year in cross-border payments are still completely underserved.
The stablecoin infrastructure for emerging markets (LatAm, SEA, Africa) is underbuilt.
B2B payroll and treasury tools sitting on top of stablecoin rails barely exist in any serious form.
Bet Three: Bitcoin's $1 trillion in idle capital is about to go to work.
a16z backed Babylon at $15M.Portal To Bitcoin raised $25M.BitcoinOS closed $10M.RIVER, Bitway, multiple others — all funded in this same window.
The thesis is almost embarrassingly simple: there is over $1 trillion in BTC that currently does nothing.
It sits. It appreciates or doesn't.
It doesn't generate yield, doesn't power DeFi, doesn't do anything except exist.
That is a massive inefficiency.
The first teams to build BTC lending, BTC yield infrastructure, BTC L2 DeFi are capturing something that cannot be easily replicated.
The moat is the Bitcoin itself.
You cannot fork $1 trillion of holder conviction.
Bitcoin DeFi is now a multi-year investment theme with tier-1 institutional validation.
The first-mover advantages still exist but not for long.
Bet Four: DeFi is not dead - it is growing up.
This one surprises people. They hear "DeFi" and think 2021: yield farms, liquidity mining, anonymous teams printing tokens.
That DeFi is not getting funded. What is getting funded is something different - institutional-grade versions of the same primitives.
Lighter raised $68M from Founders Fund to build the on-chain version of Binance Perps.Flying Tulip raised $200M at seed - one of the largest seed rounds in the entire dataset to build a next-generation AMM with concentrated liquidity.Ostium raised $20M for RWA-collateralized perps.Superstate raised $82.5M from Bain Capital Crypto to tokenize Treasury bills.

The sub-sectors with active funding: perp DEXs with institutional-grade order books, yield protocols backed by real rates rather than token emissions, stablecoin designs with proper collateral (not pure algos), modular DeFi primitives like Cork Protocol ($5.5M) and Curvance ($4M), and Real World Assets as the bridge between DeFi and TradFi.
The key thesis across all of them: capture fees from actual financial activity.
If your revenue disappears when token incentives stop, you will struggle to raise.
Bet Five: Infrastructure is the picks and shovels play, and the L1 wars are over.
The funded infrastructure is not about building a new chain.
Ethereum and Solana have won. The chain wars are largely settled.

What is getting funded now is about making the existing chains more useful and more compliant.
TRM Labs raised $70M from Goldman Sachs and Bessemer for on-chain compliance and KYC analytics.SEON raised $80M.LI.FI raised $29M for cross-chain messaging and bridge aggregation.Seismic raised $10M from a16z and Polychain for ZK and privacy infrastructure, the kind institutions need to participate in DeFi without disclosing positions.Talos raised $45M from a16z for institutional trading infrastructure.
The pattern: TradFi adoption creates regulatory tailwinds, and regulatory tailwinds create massive demand for compliance layers, data availability tools, and privacy infrastructure.
These are secular businesses with secular revenue, not cyclical bets on token price.
Bet Six: AI x Web3 is early, but the tier-1 investors are already planting flags.
Paradigm backed Noise at $7M - building infrastructure for AI agents to use crypto natively.Franklin Templeton backed Sentient for open-source AI development with token incentives.DeepNode AI raised $28M total. HolmesAI closed $5M.
The thesis here is not AI tokens with a vague whitepaper.
It is verifiable AI compute, decentralized model training, and on-chain agent infrastructure. The specific opportunity: autonomous AI agents will need to hold and spend crypto.
Nobody has solved wallets, gas abstraction, and payment rails for that world yet.
The category needs 2 to 3 more years to mature but the investors who will dominate it are making pre-seed and seed bets right now.
Early stage, high upside, high vaporware risk. Eyes open.
IV. Where the Money Is By Round Size
Here is something most funding discussions skip over that I think is critical if you're deciding when and how to raise.
The 173 rounds reveal a bifurcated market with a dangerous missing middle.

In other words: if you're in between product launched, some traction, but not yet at institutional scale, you are in the hardest part of the market to raise in right now.
Plan accordingly. Either stay lean and get to the metrics that unlock Series A, or raise a bridge from strategic investors who can provide distribution while you build.
V. Who Is Actually Deploying And What Unlocks a Yes
This is the part most founders get wrong. They pitch the right idea to the wrong investor and wonder why they can't raise.
After going through 173 rounds and 22+ active VCs, here is what the data actually shows:

The most important thing I'd tell a founder based on this data: match your vertical to the investor's stated thesis.
Building DeFi primitives? Go to Variant, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures.Building payments? Target Pantera, Dragonfly.Building BTC DeFi? Go to a16z and Maelstrom.
The founders who got funded did not spray and pray - they targeted.
VI. But Here's What Almost Everyone Is Still Missing
The dominant narrative in this space even among smart people is that this is a technology story.
It has not been for a while.
The biggest checks in this dataset went to teams with regulatory licenses, institutional relationships, and named enterprise clients.
TRM Labs raised $70M from Goldman Sachs and Bessemer.Anchorage raised $100M from Tether.Zero Hash raised $104M from Morgan Stanley.
Ask yourself: what did those companies have that a technically superior clone couldn't replicate in six months?
The license. The relationship. The track record.

The meta-game shifted from building a better protocol to building a defensible institution.
And a lot of people who think they're playing the technology game are losing the institutional game without realizing it.
This doesn't mean technical excellence is irrelevant
Paradigm still backs world-class engineersFounders Fund wrote a $68M check for Lighter.
Pure technical ability creates opportunity at an early stage.
But the scale stage belongs to whoever built the moat that isn't technological.
And there's a second thing most people are missing: what the market is explicitly not funding.
Zero institutional investment went to meme-adjacent projects. Not a single dedicated DAO tooling round in the entire 173-round dataset.No new L1 launches got meaningful funding - Ethereum and Solana have won, the chain wars are over.Generic NFT platforms saw 2 to 3 rounds, mostly strategic entertainment plays.GameFi pure play-to-earn with token rewards is not getting funded.

The market is not being subtle.
TVL is now a vanity metric.Investors want fee revenue, protocol revenue per TVL dollar, and a clear answer to what happens when token incentives stop.
If your pitch depends on token speculation as the go-to-market, VCs cannot build a return model on token price appreciation alone post-FTX.
If you can't answer the revenue mechanics question cleanly, you have a fundraising problem that is actually a business model problem.
VII. A Map for Builders — Where the Real Gaps Are

Here is where the data shows both investor appetite and a clear gap in what's actually been built:
Prediction market infrastructure
the core exchanges exist. The vertical platforms (biotech, climate, sports), aggregator layers, probability data APIs, and B2B risk pricing tools don't. Seed round, $2M to $8M.
2. Bitcoin DeFi primitives
BTC lending, yield, and DEX infrastructure. Babylon proved institutional appetite. BTC has $1T+ in dead capital and the tooling to put it to work is in early innings. Seed to Series A, $3M to $15M.
3. Stablecoin infrastructure for emerging markets
local-currency-pegged stablecoins or USDC payroll and treasury tools for LatAm, SEA, Africa. RedotPay's $154M total raise validates the demand signal. Seed, $2M to $10M.
4. AI agent financial infrastructure
autonomous AI agents will need to hold and spend crypto. Nobody has solved wallets, gas abstraction, and payment rails for that world. Paradigm is already planting a flag here via Noise. Pre-seed to seed, $1M to $5M.
5. On-chain compliance tooling for the SME layer
TRM Labs built the Goldman Sachs version at $70M. Nobody has built the version for the startup, the small exchange, the developer integrating payments. Seed, $3M to $10M.
6. Interest rate and yield products
Doppler ($9M from Pantera, Coinbase, Variant) and RateX ($7M) are both funded and early. On-chain interest rate swaps, fixed-rate lending, yield tokenization. Real rates are high. There is a product here. Seed, $3M to $12M.
7. DeFi risk and analytics infrastructure
nobody has built the Bloomberg Terminal for protocol risk. Liquidation monitoring, yield sustainability scoring, protocol health dashboards. The B2B SaaS model works cleanly. Pre-seed to seed, $1M to $5M.
Each of these areas has something in common: a specific named problem with a clear institutional or developer buyer.
The founders who got funded were not building for the DeFi ecosystem. They were building for tier-2 Asian exchanges needing compliance tooling.
For BTC holders who want yield without counterparty risk.
Be that specific, and you will find the investors who already believe in the problem.
VIII. What Actually Gets a Yes Right Now

I want to be direct about something before we get into this.
Most founders who can't raise don't have a fundraising problem.
They have a positioning problem.
The pitch deck is fine.The product is real.But the story they're telling doesn't match the mental model the investor is running when they're making decisions.
Here is what the mental model actually looks like in 2026, based on the 173 rounds in this dataset.
Lead with revenue mechanics, not vision.
Show how the protocol generates fees from actual activity - trading fees, liquidation revenues, interest spreads.Then describe what happens to that revenue when your token price drops 80%.If the answer is it disappears, you have a business model problem, not a fundraising problem.
Fix that first. The investors who wrote the biggest checks in this dataset - Paradigm, Founders Fund, a16z, all asked this question.
Have a clean answer.
2. Name your institutional client.
If you are building infrastructure, name the exact type of institution that will pay you.Tier-2 Asian exchanges needing compliance tooling are more fundable than the DeFi ecosystem.Specificity signals that you have done real customer discovery. Vagueness signals that you haven't.
TRM Labs got $70M because they could point to exactly who was paying them and why Goldman Sachs cared about that market.
Rain got $250M because they had the regulatory licenses and bank relationships that institutional clients require.
3. Show the Bitcoin angle if it exists.
If your project can plug into BTC liquidity, serve BTC holders, or build on Bitcoin infrastructure - say so explicitly. a16z, Pantera, and Maelstrom are all specifically looking for this right now.A project that serves ETH users and BTC users is more fundable than one that only serves ETH users.
This is a real signal from the data, not a suggestion.
4. Quantify the specific gap, don't describe the market.
The funded projects in this dataset all addressed a very specific gap:
TRM Labs = on-chain compliance for institutional TradFi adoption.Rain = stablecoin payroll and treasury rails with regulatory licenses.Talos = institutional trading infrastructure that doesn't exist in DeFi form yet.
Be that specific. The DeFi market is $X billion is not a pitch. There is no on-chain interest rate swap market, and Doppler is building is the right pitch.
5. Pick the right lead investor before you start outreach.
This sounds obvious, and most founders still don't do it properly.
Building DeFi primitives? Your targets are Variant, Paradigm, and Coinbase Ventures in that priority order based on their thesis fit.Building payments infrastructure? Pantera and Dragonfly. Building BTC DeFi? a16z and Maelstrom.Building AI x Web3? Paradigm and Franklin Templeton. The investors in this dataset are not generalists.
They have stated theses and they fund what fits.
Pitching the wrong investor isn't just a wasted meeting, it's a signal to the rest of the market that you haven't done your homework.
6. On raise size - the benchmarks the data gives you.

Raising too little signals lack of ambition.
Raising too much at seed signals you don't understand the market.
Both hurt you.
7. One more thing most founders overlook: strategic money.
A significant portion of this dataset is not VC money at all.
It's a strategic investment from exchanges, protocols, and ecosystem funds and it operates on completely different rules.
Tether was the most active strategic investor in the entire dataset. They backed Anchorage, LayerZero, t-0 Network, Ledn, Speed, Kotani Pay. Their thesis is clearly about expanding stablecoin adoption infrastructure globally.OKX Ventures backs projects that drive their DEX and wallet usage.YZi Labs (Binance Labs) provides access to the BNB ecosystem and Binance listing conversations not guaranteed, but on the table.Coinbase Ventures is the fastest to get a term sheet from in the entire dataset if your project drives Base L2 activity or Coinbase product revenue.
Strategic rounds close faster than VC rounds- no fund cycle, no investment committee.
But they come with ecosystem strings attached.
A strategic investor with pro-rata rights whose direction diverges from yours can create real friction in future fundraising. Know what you're signing before you sign it.
IX. The Investor Playbook — How to Think About Portfolio Construction Right Now
This section is for the investors in the room. (And for the founders who want to understand how the people across the table are thinking.)
Based on where the most sophisticated capital in this dataset is deploying, here is how I would think about thematic allocation in a crypto venture portfolio built today.

On red flags — what to probe before you write a check.

X. The Largest Round you should know

XI. The Actual Question This Data Is Asking You
Every major shift in the economic base creates a window - maybe 5 to 10 years, where the infrastructure for the new world is being built, and the people building it capture disproportionate value.
After that window, the infrastructure commoditizes, and the gains flow to whoever owns distribution.
We are inside that window right now.
For the payments infrastructure.For prediction markets.For Bitcoin yield.For AI-native financial rails.
The question this data is actually asking you is not where is the money going?
It's: what kind of player are you in this game?
The NPC waits for the narrative to become obvious - chases the hot sector after it's priced in, calls themselves a builder while forking existing protocols.
The player chooses their storyline with intention - picks a clear problem, matches the right investors to their stage, builds the infrastructure the world will need, regardless of which narrative is hot.
The programmer creates new games - identifies the gap before the capital does, builds the category, and raises from investors who are grateful someone finally did it.
The funding data tells me the programmers are already at work.
$3.3 billion went to two prediction market companies from people who understood what prediction markets actually were before the rest of the world caught up.Founders Fund wrote a $68M check for Lighter because someone looked at the institutional perps market and decided to build the on-chain version before anyone told them it was fundable.
The question is whether you're reading this waiting for it to be more obvious or whether you already see it, and you're deciding what to build.
— Akash (Yourweb3guy)
(I put out research like this regularly. You know where to find the follow button.)
P.S. I help Web3 teams with:

→ Fundraising & investor outreach
→ Exchange listings & liquidity strategy
→ Market Maker selection & negotiations
→ Tokenomics, PR and Marketing
→ Design, Development & Smart Contract Audits

You can book a call from my profile - link in bio

Everyone is worried about the next bull run, the next narrative, and the next airdrop meta.
But I can't help but think that we've fundamentally misunderstood what it means to build in Web3, and that misunderstanding is why 95% of projects that raised in 2021-2022 are now zombies.
The paradox is this:
The industry spent years convincing itself that decentralization was the product.
It's not. It never was.
Decentralization is infrastructure.
The product is what makes someone's life measurably better today, not in some distant future where everyone suddenly cares about trustlessness.
I've spent the last 8 months helping founders raise capital — small rounds, mostly seed and pre-seed, getting projects to that critical $25K-$50K mark where they can actually build something real.
And I can tell you this: The founders who get funded in 2026 are not the ones pitching decentralization.
They're pitching revenue.They're pitching users who pay.They're pitching products that would work even if blockchain didn't exist, but are 10x better because it does.
(By the way, if that last sentence made you uncomfortable, you're exactly who this is written for.)
What Stupid Thinking Looks Like in Web3
Stupid thinking in Web3 looks like this:
Building protocols because the infrastructure isn't there yet (it is)Launching governance tokens before you have anything to governOptimizing for TVL instead of actual product usageBelieving that your whitepaper will convince anyone of anythingThinking that community means people who speculate on your token
Stupid thinking says: We're building for the next billion users.
Genius thinking says: We're building for the next thousand paying customers, and here's exactly who they are and what they'll pay us.
The shift from stupid to genius thinking happens when you realize that Web3 in 2026 is not about disruption.
It's about production.
The infrastructure phase is over.
The let's rebuild everything on-chain phase is over.
What remains is the much harder, much more valuable work: Building products that generate revenue and solve problems people actually have.
The Evolution of Web3 Value Capture — A Historical Pattern

Let me show you something that changed how I think about this space entirely.
Stage I: The Fat Protocol Era (2017-2020)
Value accrued to Layer 1s. Ethereum, EOS, Tron - these were the winners.Applications were primitive.
The thesis was simple: Blockchains would be like the internet - open protocols capturing massive value.
Stage II: The DeFi Summer Transition (2020-2021)
Value started shifting to applications.Uniswap, Aave, Compound - these generated real fees, real usage, real revenue.But investors still thought in terms of protocols.
The "Fat Protocol" thesis persisted even as evidence mounted against it.
Stage III: The Current Reality (2025-2026)
Applications now generate 90% of all fees.Protocols capture less than 10%.The Fat Protocol thesis is dead.
Welcome to the Fat App era.
This isn't just a market cycle thing. This is a fundamental evolution in how value works in digital economies.
The same pattern played out with the internet: protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP) captured almost no value, while applications (Google, Facebook, Amazon) captured everything.
We're watching the same movie play out in Web3, just on a compressed timeline.
The Four Dimensions of Web3 Product-Market Fit in 2026

Here's what actually matters when you're building now. Not "might matter" or "could matter" — what demonstrably, measurably matters based on what's working right now.
Dimension I: Revenue Generation (The Non-Negotiable)
Prediction markets crossed $13 billion in monthly volume by late 2025.
Why?
Because they generate revenue from every transaction.Real revenue. Not TVL.Not token price appreciation.Actual fees that flow to the protocol and token holders.
2. Yield-bearing stablecoins grew 1400% in 2025.
Why?
Because they solve a real problem: Every dollar sitting in a wallet should be earning yield.Users understand this instantly.No education required.
3. Internet Capital Market launchpads on Solana are heading toward $2 billion market cap.
Why?
Because they direct capital to revenue-generating businesses, not just speculative memecoins.
Pattern recognition:
The winners all have direct, observable revenue that doesn't depend on the token price going up.
Dimension II: The Agentic Economy (Machine-to-Machine Value)
This is where things get interesting and where most founders are sleeping.
AI agents are becoming the dominant users of DeFi.
Not humans. Agents.
Autonomous software that executes trades, manages yield, optimizes portfolios, and pays for services instantly using protocols like x402.
Think about what this means: Your customer in 2026 might not be a person at all. It might be an AI agent that needs to rent GPU compute for 3 minutes, or buy real-time data for a trading decision, or optimize a yield strategy across 47 protocols simultaneously.
The agentic economy is not science fiction.
It's happening now.
And if your product requires a human to manually click buttons, you're building for the past.
Dimension III: Real-World Asset Bridge (Physical Meets Digital)
Exotic RWAs like trading cards, luxury collectibles, and physical goods with proven secondary markets are clearing $600 million in 2025.
Why?
Because people understand these assets.They've been collecting Pokémon cards since they were kids.Now those cards can be fractionalized, traded 24/7, and used as collateral for loans.
This is not about tokenizing Treasury bonds (boring, commoditized). This is about tokenizing high-value goods that people actually care about and creating new use cases that weren't possible before.
The founders winning here are using Gacha-style mechanics - randomized pack openings, rare drops, collection mechanics that tap into the same psychology that made physical collectibles a multi-billion dollar market.
Dimension IV: Vertical Integration (Owning the Full Stack)
DePIN projects that just sell raw resources (bandwidth, storage, compute) are losing to vertically integrated products that deliver finished consumer services.
Example: Don't sell me raw mobile data capacity. Sell me a mobile data plan that's 50% cheaper than Verizon because you're aggregating capacity from a decentralized network.
Own the consumer relationship.
Own the pricing.
Own the brand.
The same pattern holds across categories.
Decentralized data foundries that just collect dashcam footage for training sets are commodity businesses.
But a vertically integrated product that collects the data, cleans it, structures it, and delivers it as a finished training dataset to robotics companies - that's a real business with real margins.
We Missed Something Important (Why Fundraising Changed)

Here's what nobody told you when you started this fundraising journey:
The investor thesis shifted completely in late 2024, and most founders are still pitching like it's 2021.
Old thesis (Fat Protocol): We're building infrastructure that will be used by thousands of applications. Value will accrue to our L1/L2/protocol.
New thesis (Fat App): We have a product that generates $X in monthly revenue from Y users, growing at Z% month-over-month. Here's our unit economics. Here's our user acquisition cost. Here's our retention curve.
I've watched founders with revolutionary technology get passed over by investors who then funded much simpler products with proven revenue.
This isn't because investors are dumb.
It's because the market proved that applications capture value, not protocols.
Your fundraising strategy must reflect this reality:
Tokenomics 2.0 means showing explicit value capture mechanisms - buybacks, burns, fee-sharing. Not governance tokens with vague future utility.
The Show Me the Money Test means having an answer to: How do you make money in the next 6 months? If your answer involves your token going up in price, you fail.
Vertical Integration Proof means demonstrating you own the user relationship, not just a piece of infrastructure someone else monetizes.
(I promise this is relevant: Over 8 months of fundraising work, every successful raise, every single one - had these three elements. Every failed pitch was missing at least one.)
The Web3 Builder's Stack for 2026

If I were starting today, here's exactly what I'd build and where:
For Consumer Applications: Base
Direct distribution through Coinbase's user base. This is not about technology - it's about distribution.
The best product that nobody can find is worthless. Base solves the distribution problem.
For High-Velocity Trading: Solana
Retail traders are on Solana. Period.
If your product involves fast transactions, proprietary AMMs, or retail-native innovation, this is your home.
For Complex Applications: Monad or MegaETH
If you need 10-millisecond block times for real-time applications - order book exchanges, prediction markets with live odds, DeFAI agents executing sub-second strategies - these high-performance chains enable products that are literally impossible elsewhere.
But here's the crucial part:
The chain matters much less than the product.If your pitch starts with which blockchain you're on, you've already lost.
The Identity Shift: From Protocol Maximalist to Product Builder
This is where we get to the real shift - the one that happens inside you as a founder.
You have to stop identifying as someone who builds on blockchain and start identifying as someone who builds products that generate revenue for users and investors.
The difference is not semantic.
It's existential.
Protocol maximalists optimize for purity: decentralization, censorship resistance, trustlessness.
These are valuable properties. But they're not products.
They're product attributes.
Product builders optimize for value creation:
Does this save users money?Make them money?Save them time?Give them capabilities they didn't have before?
When you make this shift, everything changes:
Your pitch deck focuses on revenue, not technologyYour roadmap prioritizes features users ask for, not protocol improvementsYour hiring focuses on distribution and sales, not just developersYour metrics are user retention and revenue growth, not TVL and token price
This doesn't mean you abandon decentralization.
It means you recognize that decentralization is how you deliver superior value - faster, cheaper, more transparently, not the value itself.
What This Means for You Right Now

If you're building in 2026, here's your action framework:
First:
Pick a proven category with revenue visibility - prediction markets, yield-bearing stables, Internet Capital Markets, DeFAI infrastructure, exotic RWAs, data foundries, or DefiBanks.These aren't the only options, but they're the ones with demonstrated product-market fit.
Second:
Build vertical integration into your model from day one.Don't just provide infrastructure - own the consumer relationship and the revenue that comes with it.
Third:
Get revenue before you raise serious capital.Even $5K-$10K monthly recurring revenue completely changes how investors see you.It proves you can sell, not just build.
Fourth:
Choose your chain based on where your users are, not which chain has the best technology.Distribution beats tech specs every single time.
Fifth:
Build your pitch around revenue, unit economics, and user growth.Keep the decentralization benefits in there, but as supporting evidence, not the main thesis.
The Real Game
The real game in Web3 in 2026 is this: Can you build a product that generates revenue and improves lives while being measurably better because it's on-chain?
Not better in theory. Better in practice.
Better in ways users can feel immediately.
The founders who figure this out
Those who stop optimizing for decentralization and start optimizing for value creation will build the enduring applications that finally bring Web3 into the mainstream.
Everyone else will keep building infrastructure that nobody uses, raising governance tokens that govern nothing, and wondering why users choose Robinhood over their perfectly decentralized alternative.
The choice is yours.
The market has already decided which path leads to success.

stake.com クローンスクリプト
見てください、ノイズを切り抜けましょう。
あなたはギャンブルが何であるかについての軽い記事のためにここにいるわけではありません。
あなたは数字を見たからここにいるのです。
あなたはエド・クレイヴンとStakeチームが1414億2000万ドルを引き入れているのを見て、Web3のゴールドラッシュの中で、カジノがシャベルを売っていることに気づいたのです。
しかし、ほとんどの人が理解していないのは、Stakeの成功は運ではなく、建築に関するものだということです。
このプラットフォームはキュラソーのゲームライセンス（OGL/2024/1451/0918）の下で運営されており、100か国以上で数百万のユーザーにサービスを提供し、ほぼゼロのダウンタイムを実現しています。