TLDR Tech / Crypto
The Problem with CLOBs
Prediction markets reached $6.5B in combined weekly volume across Polymarket and Kalshi in April, but the CLOB architecture concentrating that growth also limits it: Kalshi's top 3 market makers supply 70% of election contract liquidity, leaving thousands of long-tail markets in entertainment, science, and culture without support. The result is 85-90% of prediction market volume locked to politics and sports, while ~$550M in total TVL sits disconnected from the $100B in DeFi capital deployed in lending and yield protocols. AMM-style permissionless infrastructure where the first participant bootstraps liquidity for the second removes the professional market maker requirement that currently gates new market creation.
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