Predictive markets have been popular for so long, why are they still niche?

Looking at traditional casinos makes it clear—prediction products are always fringe businesses with a limited core audience. This logic applies on-chain as well.

What about the contract market? That’s the real main battlefield. Leveraged trading combines liquidity, risk, and reward in a perfect ratio, representing the ultimate form for gamblers. If you have 10x, 100x leverage, why bother with fixed-odds prediction games?

For prediction markets to become mainstream, the issue isn’t with the product itself but with market psychology. In an era where on-chain trading costs are decreasing and leverage products are becoming more sophisticated, everything prediction markets can offer, contracts can do too—and often do it even better. That’s why the industry’s focus has always been on derivatives, not predictions.