#预测市场 Seeing the public fundraising controversy of Infinex and the insider trading disputes on Polymarket, my mind drifted back to the ICO frenzy of 2017. Back then, we saw too many loopholes in rule design being packaged as "innovation," only realizing the heavy costs when the market cleared.

After Infinex admitted the failure of its sales mechanism and made urgent adjustments, the move itself was not problematic—at least the project team knew when to cut losses and was still alive. But the question is, why did such flaws appear in the first round of public fundraising? Wintermute's CEO frankly said: Engaging in insider trading in prediction markets is essentially squeezing profits from uninformed retail investors. I've seen this pattern too many times, just applied in a new scenario.

During the boom of DeFi in 2021, we believed decentralization could solve information asymmetry. But prediction markets told us that no matter how open and transparent on-chain data is, as long as information gaps exist, human nature will exploit them in the most direct way. Insiders can make guaranteed profits on Polymarket—this is not market efficiency, but naked plunder.

Current prediction markets are like futures markets ten years ago; the rules are still being explored, but seasoned players have already discovered mechanism vulnerabilities. Infinex can change rules, but what about Polymarket? The real risk isn't in technology; it's whether this ecosystem will repeat past mistakes—only realizing it's too late when the regulatory storm truly hits.