Why can prediction markets retain users? The power of events behind an 85% retention rate

Question

【BlockBeats】The prediction market has recently become popular again. In mid-December, data platform Dune and market maker Keyrock jointly released an interesting study: they tracked the activity of new users across 275 crypto projects and found that Polymarket’s user retention far exceeded the industry average—its retention rate surpassed 85%.

What does this number imply? The crypto industry has long faced a tough problem: attracting new users is easy, but retaining them is difficult. Many users come in and then leave; growth looks impressive on paper but is often just a numbers game. Long-term active users are still quite scarce in the Web3 world.

Why can Polymarket retain users? The key difference lies in its operational logic. Traditional DeFi, wallets, and trading apps generally rely on liquidity incentives and subsidies to maintain activity. Once the rewards stop, users tend to leave. But prediction markets are different. They are entirely event-driven—elections, sports events, economic data releases… these ongoing real-world events are themselves reasons to participate. Users trade repeatedly because they genuinely care about the outcomes of certain events, without needing subsidies to motivate them. That’s the secret to high retention.

This discovery has made many major players uneasy. Since December, several well-known platforms have taken action: a leading exchange plans to launch tokenized stocks and prediction markets; a wallet app has partnered with Kalshi to integrate event trading directly into the wallet; the US futures trading regulator has approved a clearinghouse to offer prediction markets and clearing services; another exchange has already launched its own prediction market products in 50 US states.

In short, prediction markets are evolving from niche gameplay into an ecosystem-level layout. Once users have genuine motivation to participate—not just chasing profits—retention becomes half solved. That might also be why everyone is racing to get into this track.

PanicSeller · Accepted Answer

85% retention rate sounds good, but the key is that predicting the market itself inherently has a gambling nature.

ser_we_are_early · Answer

85% retention rate? Forget it, I still believe Polymarket really knows how to make predictions interesting... Other projects' subsidies stop and they're gone, what does this guy rely on?

LiquidationTherapist · Answer

85% retention rate? Honestly, that's a bit exaggerated... Any product with genuine trading demand can achieve this.

MetaMasked · Answer

85% this data sounds pretty impressive, but thinking about it carefully, is it really like that? Other protocols are just too weak.