From Retail Apps to Market Infrastructure

This reveals that prediction markets are still at the Robinhood stage, not the Bloomberg stage. The winning products so far made event trading simple and fun for individuals, with fast signup, curated markets, and sports and politics front ends, but they have not yet built the plumbing that larger trading firms expect, like deeper liquidity, broker style workflows, private execution, and institutional compliance rails.

• Polymarket broke out by shipping consumer grade UX on crypto rails, with curated markets and instant USDC settlement, while Kalshi built a regulated retail app with nationwide access and simple event contracts. Both histories point to products optimized first for user growth, not for institutional desk software.
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• Even now, market structure is lopsided. In Dome's analysis of Polymarket, about 1.4 million users touched the platform over two and a half years, but fewer than 8,000 users made more than 1,000 trades and those power users drove 80% of volume. Retail supplies the crowd, but a small group supplies the dollars.
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• The gap creates room for infrastructure companies. Dome is building the layer that matches the same event across venues and routes orders to the best price, which is the kind of tooling institutions need before a larger desk can treat prediction markets like another tradable asset instead of a niche app.
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The next phase is a shift from consumer apps to market infrastructure. As sports keeps adding volume and more brokers, exchanges, and market makers plug in, prediction markets should start to look less like standalone betting apps and more like a new asset class with shared liquidity, professional tooling, and embedded distribution across larger financial platforms.