Polymarket Active Wallets Decline, Shift to Contract Trading Draws Attention

Polymarket and other prediction market platforms are expanding into perpetual contracts. Despite the high interest in the U.S. midterm elections, the number of active wallets, open contract volume, and transaction counts are all on a downward trend. DeFi researcher Ignas points out that Polymarket users are primarily speculators, and the trading volume related to elections is significantly lower than that of sports and cryptocurrency markets. Therefore, perpetual contracts are attractive to them, allowing further profit extraction from speculative users. Ignas suggests that Polymarket should focus on improving its prediction market products rather than entering the perpetual contract space, leaving this track to platforms like Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Variational. Additionally, Ignas mentioned that Kalshi currently has a large amount of wash trading, so it is not considering including data from that platform for now.