Pullbacks by Truth Predict, ForecastEx Portend Looming Prediction Market Consolidation

With the environment ripe and the popularity of the exchanges growing exponentially, everyone and their brother, it seems, wants to launch a prediction market. Not all of them will succeed. Most, in fact, are likely to fall flat.

This week brought news of some early flops, companies disappearing from prediction market relevance before making any real impact. 

The prediction market plans outlined for Truth Social – the social media platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group – have been dramatically scaled back. Originally intent on launching a partnership with Crypto.com for an exchange that would offer markets on elections, economic indicators, commodity prices and sports, Donald Trump’s company indicated the product won’t look much like what was announced in October.

In its quarterly SEC filing, the company stated (h/t Dan Bernstein):

While Truth Predict remains in development, we currently expect that upon launch, it will primarily entail marketing and promotion collaboration with OG.com—a new prediction market experience announced by Crypto.com in February 2026.”

Meanwhile, ForecastEx, a DCM and DCO owned by Interactive Brokers, pulled sports from its platform more than two months ago, InGame reported this week. 

The NBA games on March 3 were the last sports event contracts offered on the exchange.  Thanks entirely to traffic from Robinhood, sports volume spiked on Feb. 13, the last day ForecastEx saw any trading on sports. That night’s three pro basketball games generated 13 million contracts on the platform, the first time “any meaningful NBA volume” was traded there, according to  prediction market trader and analyst Adhi Rajaprabhakaran.

Interactive Brokers announced today the launch of an “unified interface” to trade prediction markets across Kalshi, CME Group and ForecastEx, but the new platform appears to be focused exclusively on finance, sports being absent from the press release.

Reduction in Prediction Market Competitors Expected 

The regression of Truth Predict and ForecastEx is not a surprise. With more than 40 brands either having launched or planning to launch a prediction market, per Gaming America, it’s unrealistic to believe more than a few will flourish.

At the onset of legal sports betting, after the Supreme Court struck down PASPA in 2018, droves of companies – from startups to media conglomerates – tried to claim their piece of the action. The field has been drastically reduced. Today, there are two dominant sportsbooks, half a dozen or competing for single-digit market share, and dozens of also-rans and scratches.   

Many see a similar dynamic playing out for prediction markets.

The sportsbook-to-prediction market comparison is an obvious one many gambling industry observers have made. Mick Bransfield, a data analytics consultant and prediction markets expert, makes a different one: social media in its early days.

“Maybe just one” prediction market operator will thrive, Bransfield told Gambling Insider earlier this month. 

“Because it’s an exchange, there’s a network effect similar to a social media site –  the more people that are on it, the more people go to it,” he added. “It feels like we’re in social media circa 2010, where everyone’s launching their Facebook competitor and no one goes to it because they already have Facebook.

“If you’re competing with Kalshi, you can offer a market Kalshi doesn’t have, but then they can just clone it and offer it on their exchange. What’s gonna make people switch?”

Bransfield, who aggregates a database of prediction market-related companies, has observed that developers are pivoting from building Kalshi and Polymarket competitors to apps that integrate with the two largest platforms in the space. 

There have been 400 prediction market tools or apps built in the last year, 300 of which for one of those two exchanges, he estimates.

“So clearly there’s a movement toward each of them having their own ecosystem, which is further going to keep people on the platform,” Bransfield said, “similar to Farmville and all those games building off of Facebook, rather than Google+ Circles.” 

‘What’s Your Right To Win?’

Not all those 400 will evolve into robust businesses. Some ideas are good, others less so. Some will gain traction, others won’t. 

As managing partner of Discerning Capital, Davis Catlin hears pitches frequently from entrepreneurs seeking investment for their proposal to innovate in the space. 

“The way that I evaluate a lot of these companies and spaces [is asking] ‘What’s your right to win?,’” Catlin told us in March during a discussion about a potential prediction markets bubble.

“If you’re a college kid who’s got a cool idea, ‘Do you have the right to win in this space? Are you credible? Do you have any connections? Do you have the relationships? Do you have the expertise?’,” he added.

“Some of them do. Some of the things we’re seeing are really interesting, others are just sort of people who read about [prediction markets] in the Wall Street Journal and they wanna build a business around it because it’s hot.”