The future for onchain Prediction Markets may be on RobinHood L2
Yes, Polymarket did blaze the trail for onchain Prediction Markets.
But they are moving away form it to become a centralized Sportsbook (Polymarket US)
Robinhood is going in the opposite direction
They started as a Centralized stocks broker and are pivoting towards decentralized onchain Prediction Markets.
Robinhood may not have Hyperliquid's tech, but they have the best retail distribution
Their latest effort is
@MeridianPredict
The project only launched in July but they have the backing of
@vladtenev.
On the tech side it's pretty interesting.
They are trying to solve the Prediction Market liquidity problem by getting rid of the orderbook entirely.
Polymarket is basically an exchange:
- tokenized YES/NO shares
- central limit order book to trade them like assets
- counterparty is other traders
Great for a limited number of markets, but add too many markets and they all become iliquid.
You can see how poor liquidity is on Polymarket despite all the free money they give in LP rewards + Maker rebates
Meridian replaces all of this with a RFQ (Request for Quote) model :
- Trying to trade generates an RFQ
- dedicated LP propose quotes
- best quote is shown as the price to the user
- liquidity doesn’t need to sit permanently in every single market
That last point matters a lot.
A CLOB scales badly to millions of obscure markets because each one needs active quoting.
RFQ allows you to create tons of market without hurting liquidity, because you only have to price them when someone actually wants to trade.
That's the right approach if you want to capture retail.
The more markets you have the more attention and headlines you generate.
Polymarket understood that but didn't build the right infra to scale in that vertical.
Excited to see what Meridian will do with this new approach and what will come out of the Robinhood L2 ecosystem.