Game of Thrones: Why Billionaires from Trump to Zhao Changpeng are Betting on the "Prediction Market"

Author: on-chain Apocalypse

Introduction: A Game of Chance and Power

Imagine a place where you can bet on anything: Who will be the next President of the United States? Will the Federal Reserve cut interest rates next month? Even, can your favorite actor win this year's Oscar?

In 2025, the prediction market experienced a genuine “explosive growth”. Just in the third week of October, the weekly trading volume broke the $2 billion mark for the first time, setting a record high for the platform. The entire market is extremely hot. This is not a slow evolution; it is a sudden gold rush.

Behind this outbreak are three powerful forces that cannot be ignored; when political leaders, Wall Street, and the core crypto circle all turn their attention and money to the same place, we must ask one question: What exactly did they see?

The answer splits into two completely different yet equally enticing stories.

Chapter 1: The Big Players Enter, Game Rules Start to Change

Role One: Trump's “Truth Prediction” - Social Media Meets Financial Betting

This week, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), under Trump, announced its entry into the prediction market through the Truth Social platform, officially launching the “Truth Predict” service.

An evolution of political marketing: a carefully designed “social + financial” hybrid.

Imagine this scenario: You see a post about the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision on Truth Social, and with a few clicks, you can convert the platform's rewards “Truth gems” into CRO tokens for betting. This is no longer the traditional “have an opinion first, then bet” approach, but a brand new model of “betting while socializing.”

The ambition of Truth Predict goes far beyond this:

• User-oriented: The goal is to achieve “democratize information” for its 6.3 million users.
• Betting range: from political elections to sports events, from commodities to Federal Reserve decisions
• Virus propagation: Every bet may become social content, creating a self-reinforcing propagation loop.

More importantly, this platform adopts a CFTC-regulated binary contract form, cleverly avoiding the legal definition of “gambling.” In the regulatory gray area, the Trump team's instincts remain as sharp as ever.

*The Beta test of Truth Predict will soon begin on Truth Social, targeting US users, supporting betting on events such as elections, economic indicators, sports, and commodity prices.

Role Two: CZ's Decentralized Layout: From Behind the Scenes to the Forefront

Compared to Trump's high profile, the layout of crypto core figure CZ is more secretive but equally precise.

Through YZi Labs (, which was established in 2018 as Binance Labs ), CZ invested in two key projects: Opinion Labs and APRO Oracle. The former builds a decentralized “truth oracle,” while the latter is a decentralized oracle network “specifically serving the Bitcoin ecosystem.”

CZ's remarks on Twitter are thought-provoking: “The prediction market urgently needs dedicated oracles,” and “Although there are only a few investors, we will do our best to help increase strategic value.”

This sentence reveals an important signal: CZ is not only focused on the prediction market itself, but also on the data infrastructure behind the prediction market. In other words, **when prediction markets become mainstream applications, the verification of data authenticity undoubtedly holds significant weight. Whoever controls the verification of data authenticity will indirectly hold the discourse power of the new ecosystem.

*The mainnet of Opinion Labs was launched on the BNB Chain on October 16, 2025, currently in an invite-only Beta phase, with a cumulative trading volume exceeding $300 million (testnet + mainnet Beta); meanwhile, the Beta testing of APRO Oracle started on October 28, targeting the first batch of developers from BNB Chain and Bitcoin Layer 2, with AI validator node registration now open.

Role Three: Wall Street's Expectations: ICE's $2 Billion Bet

The most shocking thing is the $2 billion investment by ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, in Polymarket. This is not just an investment, but an “official endorsement” of prediction markets by traditional finance.

2 billion dollars is not a small amount for Wall Street, especially for an institution known for its conservatism. ICE has always favored “hardcore finance”—in 2013, it spent about 11 billion dollars to acquire the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Euronext; in 2018, it established the crypto asset platform Bakkt, with an initial investment of only 180 million dollars. These figures together are enough to illustrate the point: ICE is betting on a completely different future.

Why? Because what prediction markets gather is not capital, but diverse judgments. In an era dominated by algorithms, the data has long been saturated; what is truly scarce is human signals. When traders, programmers, professors, and gamblers all bet on the same platform, they inadvertently produce an extremely valuable indicator—collective expectations.

And this investment may mark a shift: when mainstream financial institutions begin to treat prediction markets as sources of information rather than toys, the coordinates of the financial world will shift slightly. Algorithmic trading, risk models, investment strategies—all may be recalibrated because of these “market-driven predictions”.

*CNBC, as a leading global financial media outlet, reported that the main reason for this event is its significant financial and market impact

Chapter Two: The Motivations of Billionaires - Two Completely Different Stories

Crypto Perspective: The 'Accidental Holy Grail' of DeFi?

This first story perfectly addresses a long-standing awkward problem in the crypto world: How can DeFi (Decentralized Finance) be made accessible to the masses?

For years, the promise of “DeFi democratization” has been regarded as the holy grail of the crypto world. But the reality is that complex wallets, difficult key management, and abstract yield logic act like a high wall, keeping 99% of ordinary people out. DeFi has always been an insider game for “crypto-native users.”

However, prediction markets may become that “unexpected breakthrough.” It might become the first DeFi product to achieve large-scale adoption because it completely revolutionizes the user experience:

• Interesting and Intuitive: The way to participate is similar to a “guessing game”, betting on your judgment of the real world, rather than requiring you to understand “liquidity pools” or “impermanent loss”. Predicting whether “the next Marvel movie will exceed 1 billion in box office” is much more intuitive than calculating complex DeFi yield rates.
• Real-World Coupling: The underlying assets of prediction markets are all verifiable events in reality: presidential elections, sports events, policy regulations. This directly links the abstract value of blockchain to real life, giving it an unprecedented sense of “substantiality.”
• User-Friendly: Major platforms are working hard to allow users to participate directly with credit cards and email, completely hiding the complex on-chain technology behind the scenes. You don't even need to know what a wallet is to place a bet on the next Super Bowl.

Industry experts' predictions on prediction markets

In a Thursday article on X, researcher Rychko from a prediction market infrastructure provider pointed out that prediction markets are moving beyond cryptocurrencies into the real world, and their accessibility may make them the first decentralized finance (DeFi) product to achieve mass adoption.

“Most people will never use derivatives exchanges,” he wrote. “But 'Mamdani has an 87% chance of winning' — that's something everyone would say.”

“Humans are inherently lazy,” craving “clean and easy-to-understand signals,” and indicating that prediction markets meet this demand by transforming complex predictions into simple data points.

“It is this simplicity that allows prediction markets to achieve mass adoption faster than most DeFi experiments, as theyalign with the rhythm of human cognition**.**

Not just betting: The ecological value of prediction markets

The rise of prediction markets has also brought more possibilities to the DeFi ecosystem. Below are some existing use cases:

1. Risk Hedging: By using prediction market contracts (YES/NO shares), users can hedge against price fluctuations of DeFi assets. For example, some platforms have begun exploring how to use prediction markets to cope with the severe volatility of cryptocurrency prices.
2. Liquidity Stacking: The stock tokens of the prediction market can participate as liquidity providers (LP) in decentralized exchanges (such as Uniswap) to earn transaction fees. This mechanism not only enhances the liquidity of the market but also allows users to gain additional income.
3. Synthetic Asset Generation: Predictive market outcomes can be used to mint tradable synthetic assets. These assets can serve as financial instruments and further drive innovation in the DeFi ecosystem.
4. Information Aggregation and Transparency: Data from prediction markets can serve as reference signals, providing more accurate information for other DeFi protocols. For example, by integrating data aggregation tools such as The Graph, prediction market data is being used to optimize financial decisions and resource allocation.

In this story, prediction markets are the “Trojan Horse” for DeFi to enter the mainstream. It uses the most human-centric “betting” and “gossip” as a disguise, quietly bringing blockchain technology to the fingertips of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of users. This is not just a growth; it could be a decisive step for the Web3 world from “on-chain economy” to “real-world participation.”

Political Perspective: The “Secret Weapon” of Democracy

However, the other side of the coin is a story about power and public opinion.

What is the core of politics? It is not just about winning votes, but about shaping the “expectations” of voters. And prediction markets are precisely a perfect “expectation manufacturing machine.”

Imagine that, on the eve of the election, a candidate's winning probability is raised to 78% in the prediction market. This number itself is a piece of highly impactful news. The media will cite it (“Market predicts XX will win overwhelmingly”), social networks will spread it, and voters will see it. This “sure-win” halo backed by money will spread like a virus, shake the centrists, dampen the opponents' morale, and even create a self-fulfilling prophecy of “when the wall falls, everyone pushes.”

What’s more frightening is that this provides a brand new, hard-to-hold accountable tool of influence for power. In the past, politicians needed to influence public opinion through media or direct speech; now, you might just need a large enough amount of funds and a “suitable” platform.

By making large bets in the market, politicians can “buy” a probability that is favorable to them in the short term, and then let the media and the public amplify this signal. When questioned, the party involved can completely throw up their hands and innocently say: “I didn't lie, I was just making a legitimate investment.”

When we see Donald Trump's son, Donald Jr., become an advisor to Polymarket, and the capital associated with him invest tens of millions of dollars into the platform, we should be cautious: is this really just a simple investment?

In this story, the prediction market is no longer just a “crystal ball” that gathers wisdom, but a “secret weapon” that can be used to shape public opinion—during the 2024 election period, Polymarket's single contract trading volume for Trump's victory has exceeded $2.7 billion, and its probability fluctuations have been cited by mainstream media such as CNN, which has “predicted” the “choices” of tens of millions of voters in advance.

Conclusion: Power Restructuring in Probability Games

So, is the prediction market really DeFi's “unexpected holy grail” or democracy's “secret weapon”?

The answer may be: both.

It has the potential to become an unprecedented information aggregation tool, allowing the “wisdom of the crowd” to shine with unprecedented efficiency; it may also become a battleground of public opinion captured by massive capital and political power, where the “largest wallet” defines what is “truth.”

Currently, the two major platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket, hold the vast majority of market share, with the former having about 60-66% and the latter accounting for 34%. When platforms like Robinhood open event contract trading to their 20 million+ users, the influence of this market will grow exponentially.

The next 12-24 months will be a critical period. Can the market achieve mass adoption while maintaining the ideals of decentralization? Can it maintain innovative vitality while accepting regulation? Can it uphold the public interest while achieving commercial success?

The answers to these questions will determine whether the prediction market becomes a tool for driving social progress or a weapon that exacerbates inequality and manipulation.

And each of us will be a participant and witness in this game of chance.

“Be strong and keep playing your cards!”

Source: on-chain Revelation