Fragmented Markets Need Unified API

Fragmentation is what makes a unified API worth building. The likely shape of this market is not one winner, but a few large venues plus many smaller ones built around local regulation, local communities, or one category like sports or politics. That means developers will keep facing different rails, schemas, and liquidity pools, much like crypto developers had to support Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and a long tail of tokens and apps.

• The current leaders are already splitting by product shape. Polymarket became the biggest venue for politics, while Kalshi has been stronger in sports and regulated U.S. access. That is a sign of specialization, not winner take all consolidation.
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• New entrants do not need to beat Kalshi or Polymarket everywhere. They can win a narrower job, like serving one country, one user base, or one contract type. The interview points to teams in Latin America, South Africa, India, and Australia exploring exactly that playbook.
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• At the same time, fragmentation happens above a concentrated liquidity layer. Large apps like Robinhood, sportsbooks, and exchanges increasingly plug into existing market infrastructure because licenses are expensive and liquidity gets stronger when order flow pools together. So the market can fragment at the user experience layer while still concentrating underneath.
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Going forward, the winners around prediction markets are likely to be the companies that make fragmentation easier to navigate. Core venues will keep gathering liquidity, but developers, brokers, and niche operators will need tooling that normalizes market data, order books, and execution across many endpoints as the category spreads into more regions and verticals.