Polymarket was responsible for expanding the market, while Opinion Labs was responsible for defining the protocol.

Author: Haotian , Consultant, Amber Group

Recently, there have been rumors that @opinionlabsxyz is about to have a TGE. In fact, everyone knows that before the prediction market narrative led by @Polymarket roars into a major upward wave, there will definitely be a narrative "underground war" concerning the prediction market.

The key question is: after Polymarket pushed Mindshare to its limits through "political maneuvering," how should newcomers share the pie? Today, I'd like to share some of my observations regarding Opinion:

1) Opinion has accumulated enough market buzz. It not only received $20 million from Hack VC and Jump in its Pre-A round, but also has the expectation of becoming the leader of the BSC ecosystem prediction market. Moreover, it was able to generate more than $10 billion in trading volume in just 60 days after its public beta.

This rapid development is actually a result of large funds taking sides and voting, and it also reflects the market's expectation that it will be the first to enter the prediction market.

2) Polymarket's success is backed by high-volume event-driven trading platforms such as the US presidential election, the Federal Reserve chairman candidates, and whether the war with Iran will break out. Opinion will have to find a different path.

It chose to construct a set of "predictive primitives", focusing not on the outcome of binary options, but on pricing "probability fluctuations" in real time throughout the entire process before the expectation is realized.

For example, Opinion's focus on Pre-token Generation Events transforms many projects into on-chain assets that can be traded, while many others remain opaque. This achieves both pricing of expectations and a soft landing for projects before their primary market launch. This ability to turn "empty expectations" into "real liquidity" is key to Opinion's positioning in the eyes of crypto natives , similar to the approach taken by many projects that attempted to change the Bounding Curve token issuance method for pricing, but Opinion's method is more direct.

3) Previously, opening a prediction market required manual review and setting of settlement conditions. Opinion achieves "instant market opening" through AI oracles. Its significance lies in making the asset-based expectation itself sufficiently automated.

This means that it can not only carry macro narratives, but also delve into the micro realm. For example, the TVL volatility of a DeFi protocol or the floor price expectation of an NFT series can instantly become a tradable market.

This high frequency and extremely low friction cost allows it to cover a large number of crypto-native topics and macro indicators that Polymarket cannot cover, which are subject to 24/7 volatility.

4) Data shows that Opinion's average transaction size is over $2,500, which is clearly not just retail investors gambling for fun. It is evident that institutions are using its high liquidity to hedge risks in the market prediction.

There is bound to be a lot of fraudulent activity involved in generating $OPN points, but setting aside fraudulent activity, if institutions and arbitrageurs make up a large proportion of a platform's user profile, it actually verifies the "bearing capacity" of its underlying infrastructure.

The goal of Future Prediction Market 2.0 is to enable large funds to conduct sophisticated hedging in prediction markets, much like trading derivatives, rather than simply engaging in "gambling" at the retail level. To achieve this, the response speed, liquidity depth, and settlement logic of AI oracles will all be crucial. That concludes our discussion.

It's true that prediction markets will eventually be ignited by Polymarket and attract a large number of off-exchange users, but Opinion's approach is to define a "protocol layer" logic for global probabilistic financial infrastructure. This is very Crypto-Native and will certainly be more friendly to the native crypto market in the short term. However, it also means that its true value and potential will depend on its performance after TGE and NFA; let's wait and see.

Related reading: Primitive Ventures: Predicting the "East-West Divergence" in the Market, Why Did We Bet on Opinion Labs?