Apps and Trends to Watch: Prediction Markets Go Mainstream with Kalshi, Polymarket, and Myriad

Lately, I’ve been watching the prediction markets. These platforms, where users trade on real-world events such as elections, sports results, or economic events, are moving from the experimental fringes into the heart of the app ecosystem. What fascinates me isn’t just the trading, but how they blend financial mechanics with social and gamified features to build deep engagement.

In this second installment of our Apps and Trends to Watch series, I’m taking a look at how this category is evolving. I’m going to examine dedicated leaders like Kalshi and Polymarket, explore an innovative newcomer in Myriad, and consider what it means when established fintech players like Robinhood start adopting these features.

What’s especially interesting is that the engagement patterns emerging in prediction markets aren’t limited to this niche. These apps offer a clear window into how high-intent user behaviors form, how daily habits are reinforced, and how community can shape product stickiness. In other words, they act as a playbook for engagement design—no matter what type of app you’re building or marketing.

They show how cleverly designed loops, incentives, and social features can transform even complex financial concepts into approachable, habit-forming experiences. And those lessons extend far beyond prediction markets themselves.

Why Prediction Markets Are an Engagement Blueprint

From my perspective, the structure of prediction markets makes them a natural fit for building habits. The act of staking value on an outcome demonstrates real user intent, and the feedback loop–finding out if you were right or wrong–is inherently habit-forming. Add in social layers like leaderboards and a clear event-based rhythm, and you have a recipe for an app that encourages active daily participation rather than passive consumption.

Kalshi: Building Trust Through a Regulated Model

Kalshi operates a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)-regulated U.S. marketplace for event contracts. At the time of this publication, it is the most downloaded prediction-market app in the U.S. App Store, ranking in the top 20 in Finance since late September.

Its engagement features are straightforward but effective. The limited-time leaderboards create competitive visibility by showcasing user profit and volume, tapping directly into the desire to “beat the odds.” Meanwhile, its social feed, where users can share positions and comment, makes trading feel less like a solitary activity and more like a community-driven discovery process.

Kalshi’s “Ideas” Feed

Polymarket: Driving Habits with Decentralized Speed

Polymarket operates on a different principle, using blockchain-based infrastructure to enable speed and a wide variety of markets. Its success is notable; it even reached the #1 spot in the iOS App Store’s “Magazines & Newspapers” category on October 10 and November 4.

What stands out to me is its Daily Rewards system. This feature cleverly turns market participation into a consistent engagement loop. By rewarding users for placing competitive orders or holding long-term positions, it incentivizes the very actions that provide liquidity and stability to the platform. For the user, this can translate into user-facing rewards (e.g., daily cash rewards or an annualized yield) that reinforce frequent active participation that feel both profitable and habit-forming.

Myriad: Blending Media with Market Participation

Beyond the major players, I’m seeing interesting innovation from fully Web3-native platforms like Myriad. While currently web-only, its approach is noteworthy. Myriad directly integrates prediction trading with media consumption, creating a bridge between information and action.

Its feature set is designed for high engagement. Live events, like its “Uptober Top Trader” contest, drive bursts of competitive trading activity. More interestingly, its task system rewards users with in-app currency for activities like reading articles or taking quizzes. This creates a guided loop that channels user attention and suits those who respond to measurable progress.

Myriad’s Tasks

Robinhood: Fintech’s Adoption Signals Mainstream Momentum

For me, the strongest signal of this category’s maturation is when established fintechs adopt its mechanics. Robinhood’s experimentation with event-based contracts suggests prediction markets are being viewed as a viable engagement module for a broader audience.

By integrating these features seamlessly into its main feed, Robinhood can offer novelty and retention for its existing users without disrupting its core identity. This move points toward a future where prediction markets could become a standard feature sitting alongside stocks and crypto within all-in-one financial hubs.

Robinhood’s Prediction Markets

What App Developers Can Learn

The prediction market space is showing us that engagement innovation can scale—far beyond trading apps. Kalshi demonstrates how trust and regulation can coexist with competitive social features. Polymarket highlights how reward mechanics can drive daily participation. Myriad shows the power of blending content and action, while Robinhood’s experimentation signals that these mechanics are versatile enough to sit inside mainstream consumer apps.

For app developers, these trends point to new ways to build repeatable engagement loops rooted in real-world events, timely incentives, and social validation.

For mobile advertisers, they reveal the kinds of environments where users exhibit strong intent signals, predictable usage patterns, and a deep interest in topical content—behaviors that can inform everything from creative strategy to audience segmentation across any app category.

If you’re looking to foster stronger habits, design more interactive experiences, or better understand what drives users to take repeated action, this is a category worth watching closely. Prediction markets show us that the lines between finance, gaming, and social interaction aren’t just blurring; they’re merging into new engagement models that can inspire product and marketing strategies across the entire mobile ecosystem.

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