From Spikes to Stickiness: Durable Adoption in Prediction Markets

Turning attention into repeat behavior for global audiences

-- Justin Patel, Venture Investor at Decasonic

Spikes get attention. Stickiness compounds.

Every new product category has its moment where the innovations get evaluated in the open community. For prediction markets, Super Bowl week is one of those moments. Not because football is uniquely investable, but because it compresses the feedback loop: attention concentrates, information updates quickly, and adoption adapts in real time. 

That’s when you see what’s hype versus real adoption: depth under load, clean resolution, and whether users come back after the event. Peak volume isn’t the story. Post-event behavior is.

Tentpole moments test product adoption

Outside peak moments, prediction markets get misread as betting with a nicer UI, especially in the U.S. But distribution already looks different from sportsbooks. Awareness skews younger for prediction markets, while sports betting brands skew older.

Super Bowl week makes the infrastructure legible: depth vs. noise, distribution constraints, and trust through settlement. Liquidity concentration becomes impossible to ignore.

It also clarifies what’s being built. Prediction markets are a system, not a list. When it holds through a high-volume event, the category earns mainstream credibility.

Other than the U.S. presidential election, the Super Bowl has historically been one of the highest-volume events for prediction markets. However, we only have the 2025 Super Bowl as a baseline data point. That's why this week matters. Year-over-year tentpole performance is an easy way to read a category’s pull.

From spikes to stickiness

In this category, volume alone isn’t adoption. A single event can drag in liquidity, drive screenshots, and create a spike that disappears the next week.

Durable adoption looks different. It’s visible in the uneventful weeks.

It shows up when headline markets stay tight outside major events, when users return because the market is useful, not just entertaining, and when liquidity doesn’t reset after the narrative moves on.

That’s the whole game: turning attention into repeat behavior.

The category is moving toward valuable adoption.

At Decasonic, we underwrite innovations that achieve valuable adoption: things that become defaults, get embedded, and compound. We’re investors in Opinion because we believe it’s structurally advantaged for where this category is going.

For centuries, money has been a way to express belief. The difference isn’t forecasting, it’s rails. Crypto rails, and increasingly global mainstream distribution, turn markets into globally accessible systems.

Three things are converging:

1. Distribution is expanding: the fastest compounding surfaces are crypto-native. Where markets can travel as embedded objects, not just live in a destination app. That’s Opinion’s core wedge: distribution that’s composable by default. In parallel, distribution is also expanding through mainstream media surfaces (e.g., Dow Jones across The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and MarketWatch) and TV (CNBC / CNN). Those are real distribution unlocks, but they’re also more gated. Opinion is built to scale globally inside existing rails.
   

2. Structure is maturing: in the U.S., regulated event contracts are pushing the category closer to “financial primitive” perception, but that also creates choke points where distribution can get throttled by soft bans even without sweeping federal changes. Opinion’s global-first posture is a different bet: scale through permissionless rails and composability, not narrow distribution windows.
   

3. Infrastructure is catching up to the product promise: old prediction markets struggled with settlement bottlenecks and trust. The next era is throughput + quality: resolution capacity, review load, and market-creation quality control. This is where Opinion’s AI emphasis matters operationally. Not as hype, but as the mechanism that keeps markets scalable and legible as supply expands.

What changed: adoption is becoming visible

Demand is no longer the bottleneck. People want real-time signals in a legible format. The bottleneck is whether platforms can turn attention into repeat behavior without breaking trust.

Liquidity is consolidating. Unlike sportsbooks and virtual casinos, this category isn't fragmenting into dozens of winners. It's compressing into a few venues that can hold depth. That matters because liquidity compounds: tighter markets pull more flow, which tightens markets further.

Source: Artemis

Open interest is the cleaner signal. Volume can be episodic; open interest (or TVL, depending on the venue) shows where conviction stays deployed. It separates single-event users from actual adoption and trading.

Prediction Market Open Interest and market share - source

Prediction Market Weekly Volume and market share - source

The Big 3: same endgame, different distribution paths

Super Bowl week makes one thing obvious: the top platforms are converging on the same endpoint, but taking different roads.

• Opinion: crypto-native distribution and composability.

• Polymarket: global crypto liquidity plus cultural virality.

• Kalshi: regulated mainstream access.

Before getting into the “why,” it’s worth mentioning the scoreboard for Super Bowl champion volume across the three (and remember: the flywheel matters more than the rank):

               Opinion: $207m                Polymarket: $697m                Kalshi: $158m

Those numbers matter less as “who’s the biggest” and more as “what kind of flywheel is forming.”

Opinion: crypto-native distribution plus composability (and it’s already showing up in size)

Opinion Labs is the AI-native prediction market driving sustained adoption with global audiences. The wedge here isn’t the event. Its distribution and how fast the system can scale without getting messy. Distribution advantages Opinion over other attention- seeking players. 

Opinion is building inside crypto-native surfaces, wallets, communities, integrations, so markets can travel as embedded objects, not just live in one destination app. They become embedded objects other builders route through. The chain choice reinforces that intent: BNB Chain for crypto-native distribution at scale. Opinion is also positioned as a liquidity layer that aggregates flow across crypto-native surfaces, so depth compounds as distribution expands: tight markets, better price quality, and more repeat behavior. 

The underappreciated piece is the AI layer. Opinion has positioned Opinion AI as a core oracle mechanism for resolution, and it’s also used to make permissionless market creation simpler: drafting tighter rules, checking resolvability standards, and reducing ambiguous outcomes.

Agent trading and AI integration are the next compounding loop. Opinion isn’t just using AI to moderate markets; it’s pushing toward AI-native market throughput:

• AI-driven market generation: AI can generate markets off real-time data inputs, which increases speed of supply.

• Algorithmic participation: the system is designed for humans and algorithmic/AI participants. Strategies can run continuously and liquidity can show up as software, not just attention.

• Important distinction: enabling AI to trade inside Opinion is different from “multi-agent trading” frameworks that point LLMs at public equities fundamentals/sentiment. This is market-native automation.

On incentive alignment, Opinion’s Point System is framed around rewarding contributions that improve market quality and tying that to future incentives. That’s the correct decision because it aligns ownership and participation with market quality.

The durability lever is composability and scalable resolution. Markets that don’t just live on one app, but live inside existing daily workflows. Workflows are inherently sticky.  

Opinion Volume by Category - source

Polymarket: liquidity plus attention

Polymarket has the internet-native advantage. If something is culturally alive, there’s a market. That market gets screenshotted. Screenshots pull flow. Flow tightens markets. 

Polymarket is also pushing beyond “crypto distribution” into mainstream surfaces. On the media side, it has an exclusive prediction-market partnership with Dow Jones that integrates Polymarket data across outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch. It’s also showing up in culture, including on-stage references by Trevor Noah and by pulling stunts like its Free Grocery Market to gain attention.  

Polymarket Volume by Category - source

Kalshi: US distribution is their focus

Kalshi’s edge is regulatory posture. When an event goes mainstream, marginal UX matters less than whether users can onboard quickly, trust the venue, and feel like the product is allowed to exist inside normal channels, and regulation is what makes that legibility possible.

But it’s worth being explicit about the current lane: Kalshi has leaned heavily into sports, and sports-driven flow appears to dominate much of its activity today. That’s a strength during tentpole moments, but it also pulls the product closer to the sports gambling frame, inviting additional scrutiny and creating new choke points for distribution.

Durability is expanding from sports into a daily probability interface

Kalshi Volume by Category - source

Where durable adoption lives

The headline market is the center of gravity. That’s where you get maximum attention, spikes in liquidity, and a clear aggregation moment. It's when prediction markets actually function as “probability as an interface.”

The long tail behaves differently. Props are fun, but they’re also noisy: thinner liquidity, more edge cases, more room for abnormal price behavior. If a platform over-optimizes the long tail before it earns trust in the core, it’s taking integrity risk for marginal growth. Low-liquidity markets don’t attract big tickets.

This is one of the most underappreciated durability dynamics. You don’t get stickiness by listing more markets. You get stickiness by making the core markets tighter, cleaner, and more reliable…then expanding. Opinion does this well with their macro focus.

The opportunity ahead

When underwriting a prediction market platform, we are not only looking at events offered. We underwrite compounding behavior: headline markets tighten over time; users return between tentpoles; capital stays deployed; resolution stays clean.

This is where the AI layer gets under-priced. The best experience isn’t the number. It’s the system: what moved, why it moved, what changed, and what to do next. That’s how prediction markets become workflow, not entertainment.

Forward look: 2026 is stacked with global events. The Super Bowl is cohort one.

Super Bowl week is a great test, but the real story is what the rest of 2026 gives these platforms: repeated, multi-week attention funnels, three separate chances to prove stickiness.

We’ve still got the global events, the Winter Olympics (February 6, 2026) and the FIFA World Cup (June 11-July 19, 2026), as well as the domestic event of the U.S. midterm election cycle (November 3, 2026). 

This cadence matters because it’s multiple retention cohorts across different event types. If users return across all of them, liquidity stays deployed, resolution stays clean, headline markets keep tightening, adoption is real.

The other variable that could define the year is token-aligned economics. Polymarket has been explicit about a token and an airdrop after a U.S. relaunch. Opinion is already running a points system designed around future incentives that reward meaningful participation and market quality. Designed correctly, this is additive: it turns the best users into long-term owners, deepens core liquidity, and reinforces the part of the product that actually compounds.

The Super Bowl is the first cohort. The Olympics, World Cup, and midterms are where durable adoption either compounds or the category stays event-driven.

Closing

Spikes are easy. Stickiness compounds valuable adoption.

Super Bowl week shows the product under pressure; the rest of 2026 shows whether it compounds. The real test isn’t just one U.S. tentpole; it's whether these platforms can hold depth, resolve cleanly, and retain users across global attention cycles, on global rails, for global audiences.

The winners won’t look like “the best place to bet.” They’ll look like the default interface for probability, where people go to confirm belief, anywhere the world is paying attention. And once that happens, prediction markets start behaving like infrastructure.

The content of these blog posts is strictly for informational and educational purposes and is not intended as investment advice, or as a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any asset. Nothing herein should be considered legal or tax advice. You should consult your own professional advisor before making any financial decision. Decasonic makes no warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the content in these blog posts. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Decasonic. Decasonic disclaims liability for any errors or omissions in these blog posts and for any actions taken based on the information provided.