Prediction markets (PMs) are having their moment. They are a great source of information as they incentivize information aggregation and reward participants who are correct. Last week, markets accurately predicted ahead of news outlets that Biden would drop out of the race. Traditional media skeptics are flocking to prediction markets for news. As a result, Polymarket processed $100m+ this June and is on track to grow more with the upcoming election.

If PMs are so useful, why aren’t they more popular? Even the most mature PMs in the market suffer from severe illiquidity – a symptom of a lack of users. The most popular PM had 30k monthly active traders in June. While impressive for crypto, it is still orders of magnitude lower than what breakout consumer products need. PMs lack users because they:

• Are suboptimal financial assets

• Haven’t penetrated the popular consciousness

• Haven’t grown beyond sports and political markets

For PMs to become the world’s most accurate information source, they must attract more liquidity, users, and markets. Current PMs are often politically biased due to poor market penetration beyond the rationalist forecaster community and offer few liquid longtail markets.

Due to these issues, memecoins are eating PMs’ lunch. Crypto native PM users are especially frustrated by high opportunity costs and the inability to create markets. The #1 all-time trader on Polymarket has only made $1m in profits, a tiny amount compared to what degens are used to. While memecoins may not neatly correlate with event outcomes, they can be permissionlessly created and offer greater upside. Thus, why would degens participate in Trump vs Kamala markets and earn 2-3x when they could ape $TREMP or $KAMA and earn 10-100x?

Swaye solves this problem. Ape or create prediction market memecoins tied to event outcomes and watch number go up.

Swaye is a user generated prediction market with uncapped upside. We feature permissionless market creation (anyone can create markets), positive-sum markets (event outcomes are bonding curve memecoins), and social-first experiences (built on Farcaster / X for context-rich markets and creator reputation). In doing so, we enable creators to capitalize financially and socially on their contrarian takes, traders to profit off future events with minimal opportunity costs, and consumers to make socially native predictions.

How Swaye works:

• Anyone can create a market and earn 1.5% of the market’s transactions

• Market event outcomes are tokenized as bonding curve memecoins

• Participants trade market outcome tokens with Base ETH any time before market settlement

• Market creators can settle the markets before or upon market expiration

• After settlement, the losing outcome token’s ETH is used to purchase the winning outcome’s bonding curve token, driving the price up and rewarding winners

• The winning outcome token becomes a permanently tradable memecoin

We built Swaye for crypto natives. Degens are the best PM early adopters as they bring in substantial liquidity, embrace speculation, and are aligned with PMs’ libertarian values. Additionally, crypto enables 24/7 global liquidity, permissionless markets, decentralized oracles, and a massive market structure design space. We believe prediction markets are a killer crypto use case and that winning the crypto audience is the first step to bringing prediction markets to normies.

Swaye’s Closed Beta is now live at swaye.co. Deposit Base ETH and start predicting now! Closed beta participants get first access and can enter the bonding curves before everyone else. User generated markets and other features will be coming soon. Learn more in our FAQ.

If you are interested in what we’re doing and believe in a world where decentralized prediction markets are the world’s most objective source of information, please message me on X or Farcaster. Additionally, if you want to help build this future, we are hiring for a founding engineer.

Lastly, keep on the lookout as we’ll be publishing blog posts that dive into Swaye’s unique designs and how we’re solving for the lack of liquidity, users, and markets. We hope that other builders can learn from our experiments and push this product category forward together.

We can’t wait to see you on Swaye!

Special thanks to Dmitriy Berenzon, Eli Qian, Tony Lee, Rose Kuan for the feedback and to the entire Swaye team for bringing this product from idea to reality