Whoa! The first time you watch a prediction market flip from 10% to 90% in an hour it jostles your brain. Markets can move faster than news cycles. My instinct said this is chaos—then the numbers said something else. Initially I thought that decentralized betting was just gamblers playing with gas fees, but then I noticed patterns that looked a lot like information aggregation. Hmm... somethin' about crowd wisdom keeps showing up.
Here's the thing. Decentralized prediction markets let people trade on outcomes — elections, sports, or whether a protocol will ship a feature — using event contracts coded on-chain. These contracts encode payoffs, settlement rules, and dispute paths. Medium players and retail traders both participate. On one hand you get spectacular price discovery; on the other, you get oracles, front-running, and obviously weird incentives. Really?
Let me be honest: I'm biased, but markets that are transparent and permissionless often produce…