OKX Ventures

We invest in founders and companies who are passionately building towards a blockchain-based economy.
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[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

OKX Ventures' Perspective

Prediction markets are evolving from event-driven trading tools into a new generation of information-financial infrastructure. The record $10.8 billion in weekly trading volume reflects not only the convergence of high-profile events, but also a broader shift in how people understand uncertainty. Increasingly, users are relying on market prices rather than traditional media narratives to interpret and assess real-world outcomes.

As on-chain liquidity deepens and product experiences improve, the growth of prediction markets is exhibiting a clear "rising floor" dynamic. Even during periods without major headline events, trading activity remains significantly higher than in previous market cycles.

OKX Ventures believes the sector sits at the intersection of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and information economics. Looking ahead, the key growth drivers will include more efficient market mechanisms, AI-powered information discovery, and clearer regulatory frameworks. The long-term value of prediction markets lies not only in trading activity itself, but also in their role as foundational infrastructure for global probability pricing and consensus formation.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

Weekly Trading Volume Hits Record $10.8 Billion, Prediction Markets Are Reshaping the Mechanism of Truth Discovery

For the week ending June 15, prediction markets recorded a historic $10.8 billion in weekly trading volume, marking an all-time high. A series of major events converged during the same period, collectively driving this surge, including the SpaceX IPO, a peace agreement between the United States and Iran, the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup Final, and the start of the FIFA World Cup.

Just one year ago, weekly trading volume in prediction markets typically stood at around $500 million, and even during the most active periods rarely exceeded $1 billion. Since then, the market has expanded rapidly: weekly volume surpassed $1 billion last autumn, exceeded $4 billion during the winter, and stabilized within the $6–7 billion range this spring.

Today, even a relatively quiet week for prediction markets generates trading volume that far exceeds the peak levels seen during the most active periods a year ago.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

But a balance sheet willing to sell does not remove the need for intermediation. You still need a layer of market makers to take the risk: manage inventory, hedge delta, transform maturities, and quote multi-leg structures. A mature onchain options market will likely run in three layers. One end is the balance-sheet sellers monetizing upside: spot holders, LSTs, treasuries, funds. The other end is the professional buyers: hedgers, structured products, vol traders. The middle is RFQ, market makers, and portfolio margin, taking the risk and converting it.

Flip it around. Onchain options do not have to win by getting retail to open an options chain and pick strikes and expiries. They are more likely to arrive as plumbing first: covered-call vaults, principal-protected notes, stable assets with capped upside, liquidation-free leverage, treasury yield enhancement. Retail can still be the end user, just in a new role: the buyer of the wrapped product and the depositor of the assets. The side that sets prices and provides depth stays professional.

This is where Vitalik's proposal hits its real constraint. He wants options settlement at expiry to replace real-time debt liquidation. Break the payoff apart. In dollar terms, with S as the ETH price at expiry and K as the target strike: the stable leg pays min(S, K), which is the same as holding 1 ETH and selling a call struck at K. The upside leg pays max(S − K, 0), a call-like residual claim. So the real question is who holds that residual upside over time, who provides depth at each rebalance, and who absorbs the gamma and inventory in a tail event.

A design like this does not need an external vanilla options market to lean on first. It does need to grow an equivalent risk-absorbing market. Whether it is a Derive or Deribit style options market or a native P/N secondary market, someone still has to price vol, hold the residual convexity, and provide liquidity at each rebalance. Without that bottom layer, the stable leg has removed liquidation mechanics, but not economic risk. It has swapped forced liquidations for liquidity, roll cost, slippage, and peg-drift risk.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

Vitalik just proposed building index assets and stablecoins on options instead of debt. Derive's onchain options volume hit a new high. So the old thesis is back in the timeline: every asset class matures through options, so options will move onchain too.

Most DeFi trading categories that worked got there retail-first. Permissionless retail speculation creates the volume, and institutions follow. Onchain options are probably one of the few categories that have to run the other way: professional liquidity and balance sheets first.

Onchain perps pushed the DEX-to-CEX ratio into double digits in 2025. As a share of combined CEX and DEX volume, that lands somewhere around 10% to 16%, depending on how you count. Onchain options are still a low single-digit market. By open interest, Derive held about 0.8% of the BTC options market in March 2026. Even on its most flattering metric, monthly notional, it only touched roughly 1.7% at its March peak. The gap is structural. The two sides that actually set options depth and pricing are not retail.

Any two-sided market is sustainable only when each side wants its position for its own sake. The moment one side shows up only for emissions, points, or rebates, the market is renting liquidity. Cut the subsidy and the liquidity leaves. Look at the post-mortems on onchain options and the same pattern shows up every time. One side is the hard side, the side no one naturally wants to hold, so the protocol papers over the gap with token emissions.

• In DeFi option vaults, the hard side is the depositor. The auction timing, strategy, and supply schedule are all public. Market makers can anticipate the fixed Friday window, price around it, and pre-position ahead of the auction. The concentrated selling pushes IV down, and depositors get filled at worse prices. They think they are earning yield. They are selling volatility. The 2022 drawdown made the tail risk obvious. A put-selling vault was never paying risk-free yield. It was paying a short-vol risk premium.

• AMM-based options just move the hard side onto LPs. Implied volatility is not an onchain state variable, so AMM pricing lags. A passive pool cannot reprice fast enough against informed flow, so LPs end up holding adversely selected order flow. They are short vol over time and cannot hedge it dynamically. In some designs they also accumulate gamma, vega, and tail exposure they may not be equipped to manage.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

Back to the two sides, starting with demand. Retail demand for directional leverage already went to perps, which strip out strike and expiry. Retail demand for event and narrative bets went to prediction markets, which offer a cleaner yes/no payoff. This is not about retail being unable to handle options. In May 2025, zero-day options were more than 60% of S&P 500 options volume. The appetite is there. The problem is that in crypto, the two option use cases retail understands best were taken first by simpler products. What remains is demand that actually needs strikes, expiries, a vol surface, and portfolio margin. That is professional demand: hedging a book, running structured yield, or trading volatility itself.

Derive did close to $1B in RFQ options volume in March 2026. On Derive, RFQ has replaced the order book as the main way options trades get done. The large tickets have been concentrated in BTC and multi-leg structures, which is exactly how a professional derivatives desk trades. Wintermute's 2025 OTC report points the same way: options flow is led by systematic yield and risk-management strategies for the first time, and one-off directional bets are fading.

Now the supply side. The balance sheets that can sell volatility steadily are the ones with a structural reason to be short vol: covered-call funds, derivative-income products, structured-note issuers, and long-term asset pools that run an options overlay. Equity-specific strategies in Morningstar's derivative-income category crossed $150B in assets by January 2026. Traditional markets already have a deep pool of capital willing to run option overlays on existing equity exposure and convert part of the upside, or the volatility, into recurring income. Crypto has almost none of it.

Most of the volatility sold onchain so far came from retail depositors chasing a yield wrapper and from passive LPs. That supply can build TVL in a calm market. It rarely survives volatility, losses, or a cut in incentives. The supply that sticks is the kind that exists as a byproduct of an asset someone already holds. A holder of ETH or a staking token writes a covered call against it. That is just monetizing the upside on a position they already own: trading away some upside they are willing to give up for income they get to keep. It is the cleanest form of natural supply, and likely the first that can scale without a subsidy. Early forms of this are already here. In February 2026, Nasdaq-listed Hyperion DeFi partnered with Rysk to run an institutional onchain options-income vault on HyperEVM, using HYPE LSTs and stablecoins as collateral.

[OKX中文 @okxchinese]

GM🐲

端午安康！

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

5. Tokenized equities are high-velocity RWA

Tokenized equities are a different animal from tokenized T-bills, money market funds, or private credit. Those are passive by nature, and their value is yield, stability, and simply being held onchain. Stocks are volatile by nature, and that volatility generates velocity.

That is where tokenized equities matter more to a chain. The value that accrues is transaction velocity, and TVL is only a slice of it. Price moves pull in arbitrage, market-making, lending, collateral, perp hedging, basis trading, options, and structured products. All of that means more frequent trading, more complex risk transfer, more durable fee revenue, and more surface area for DeFi to build on.

This comes down to what the asset is. Something that moves, trades, and can be posted as collateral or hedged is far more likely to end up inside the onchain financial machine than something held only for the yield. Beyond traditional-asset TVL, tokenized equities stand up a new onchain risk market.

This may be the most useful thing SpaceX shows a trading chain like Solana. A lot of Solana's onchain activity has come from memecoins, perps, and high-frequency assets. Tokenized equities, if they hold up, offer a different class of asset: longer-duration, larger-scale, and far easier to bring institutions into.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

SpaceX's IPO is worth reading as a market-structure stress test. It lines up almost every condition you would want for one: enormous public attention, a tiny initial float, deep global retail demand, and a wave of crypto-native venues that spun up SPCX markets on both sides of the listing.

Using the roughly 13.08B prospectus share count Arrakis works from, the initial offering is about 4.25% of shares outstanding, or 4.88% if the greenshoe is exercised in full. That makes SpaceX closer to a mega-cap liquidity event than a real new issuance.

So the question is simple: when the most-watched asset in the world hits public markets, do price formation, secondary trading, and the way it gets represented start happening on crypto rails first?

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

4. The secondary experience improved. The DeFi loop hasn't closed.

On listing day, three SpaceX tokens on Solana did a reported $37M in combined first-day volume. For tokenized equities, headline volume isn't the real answer. What matters more is where the volume comes from: public DEX liquidity, orderbooks, prop AMMs, RFQ, dark pools, or cross-venue arbitrage.

Verifiable depth tells you more than volume does. A tokenized stock can put up a big number, but if the public DEX pools are thin and most of the liquidity comes from closed market-making or off-chain matching, its composability with the rest of DeFi stays limited. What actually measures it is verifiable public depth, credible backing, and a redemption path you can rely on.

Issuer fragmentation is the other thing that turns real. The same underlying stock can show up as several tokenized versions, each with its own issuer, legal structure, redemption rules, compliance limits, and liquidity pool. In the short run that means experimentation and competition. Over time it means basis, slippage, user confusion, and trust costs, and the market most likely consolidates toward a handful of issuers and venues with deeper liquidity, cleaner redemption, and a steadier trading experience.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

Key Takeaway

The first 5 days of data prove it: sports events are prediction markets' ultimate catalyst. When the world's largest sports IP (FIFA), the largest regulated prediction market (Kalshi, $100B+ lifetime), the largest onchain prediction market (Polymarket, $2.1B+ single World Cup market), and a major crypto exchange (OKX Exchange OS) all simultaneously embrace World Cup predictions, prediction markets have evolved into normalized global sports infrastructure.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

The FIFA World Cup Kicked Off on June 11, and Prediction Markets Shattered Multiple All-Time Records Within 5 Days

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

4. ADI Predictstreet × Chainlink: FIFA's First Official Prediction Market Infrastructure

• ADI Predictstreet became the first-ever Official Prediction Market Partner of the FIFA World Cup 2026™ (new category).
• Adopted Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) as exclusive oracle infrastructure.
• Three automated workflows — market creation, outcome resolution, and settlement — all powered by Chainlink oracles feeding official FIFA data in real time.
• Structural significance: FIFA no longer treats prediction markets as a gray area — it actively created an official partner category, marking the world's largest sports IP formally endorsing prediction markets.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

Takeaway:

Traditional market infrastructure is moving on-chain, while crypto-native firms are obtaining regulated market-structure permissions.

These two forces are pushing tokenized equities beyond a speculative RWA narrative and toward a more compliant and institutionally viable market structure.

The moat in the next cycle will not be defined solely by public-chain performance or headline TPS figures. It will also depend on:

– who controls the underlying assets,
– who provides custody and asset backing,
– who owns the issuance and distribution layer,
– who controls the on-chain settlement rails,
– who holds the key regulatory licenses,
– and who can manage hybrid on-chain/off-chain complexity at scale.

The tokenized equity market is increasingly becoming a contest over infrastructure, distribution, regulation, and settlement — not just blockchain throughput.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

The tokenized financial asset market on #Solana generated over $100M in trading volume over the past 24 hours — driven largely by names such as $SPCX (#SpaceX).

Liquidity continues to concentrate on Solana. It has led all blockchains in on-chain tokenized stock trading volume for 50 consecutive weeks (~97% market share) and has overtaken #Ethereum for the #1 spot by market capitalization, reaching $874M.

Holder wallets stand at ~192K, representing roughly 64% of the cross-chain total.

[OKX Ventures @OKX_Ventures]

Tokenized stocks have surpassed $1.2B in market capitalization, with growth continuing to accelerate.

Even so, they still account for only ~2.5% of the broader #RWA market, compared with ~67% for #Treasuries and other institutional assets.

Retail adoption came first; now institutional participation is beginning to connect from both ends.

#DTCC — the incumbent steps in.

As custodian of more than $100T in U.S. securities, DTCC holds a three-year SEC no-action letter and plans limited production activity in July, followed by a broader platform rollout in October.

Initial coverage includes Russell 1000 equities, ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries, positioning the platform as a bridge between TradFi and DeFi.

U.S. equities have settled on T+1 since May 2024. Its #Chainlink-powered Collateral AppChain is designed to enable 24/7, near-real-time collateral management across global markets — moving collateral "just in time" rather than "just in case."

The objective is not simply putting stocks on-chain. The deeper market-structure question is whether tokenization can compress post-trade layers, improve collateral mobility, and reduce capital trapped in settlement windows.

#Paxos PSSC — the crypto-native side gets licensed.

In May 2026, it secured the first SEC clearing and CSD registration granted to a blockchain-native firm (under temporary exemptive relief for up to 18 months), enabling same-day (T+0) settlement on a permissioned blockchain.

This model has direct implications for balance-sheet efficiency, counterparty risk, and capital utilization.