Fewer Than 8,000 Drive 80% Volume
Kurush Dubash, CEO of Dome, on unified API for prediction markets
The important point is that prediction markets look mass market on the surface, but the economics are controlled by a tiny class of heavy traders. In practice, that means the casual user brings attention and headline user counts, while whales, small quant shops, and market makers create most of the liquidity and set the pace of the market. That is why infrastructure for routing, analytics, and execution matters as much as consumer growth.
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The concentration is extreme. In the interview, fewer than 8,000 Polymarket users out of roughly 1.4 million total users over two and a half years accounted for 80% of volume. That is about 0.6% of users driving the market that actually clears dollars.
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This pattern fits how the category is evolving. Many of Dome's customers are not casual bettors, they are builders, trading firms, market makers, and apps using prediction market data for arbitrage, copy trading, backtesting, parlay pricing, and fast execution across venues.
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It also helps explain the split between Polymarket and Kalshi. Polymarket's crypto rails and public on chain data make it easier to build trading tools around high frequency behavior, while Kalshi's regulated U.S. setup attracts more mainstream distribution and large sports volume. Both still depend on a relatively small base of very active traders to keep books liquid.
Going forward, the winners in prediction markets will be the platforms and tooling layers that serve power users best while packaging the product for everyone else. As sports and embedded distribution bring in more casual users, more of the profit pool should flow to exchanges, brokers, and API layers that capture the activity of the few traders who do thousands of trades, not the many who place one or two.