This week, Polymarket has garnered significant attention due to various developments surrounding the prediction platform. It is gaining credibility as ICE explores a $9 billion deal, capturing Wall Street’s interest.
In this context, the network’s influence extends across multiple chains and protocols that underpin its decentralized prediction markets.
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Altcoin Stacks Fueling Polymarket’s Breakout Moment
Recently, BeInCrypto reported that Polymarket might host the largest airdrop in the industry. Coupled with news of a potential ICE investment, this positions certain altcoins to benefit from the platform’s rising value.
1. UMA: The Unseen Backbone of Prediction Markets
Though UMA is crucial to Polymarket, it often goes unnoticed. While attention is fixed on Polymarket’s rapid growth, UMA serves as the quiet infrastructure layer that enables decentralized predictions.
Polymarket leverages UMA’s Optimistic Oracle (OO) for transparent market outcome verification. This decentralized data validation method allows proposers and disputers to ascertain the truth on-chain, eliminating reliance on a central authority.
“Polymarket supports UMA as a resolution source for markets displayed on the Polymarket.com interface. Although Polymarket is, at its core, oracle agnostic, the UMA integration offers another option for market creators,” the platform noted in a recent blog post.
Beneath the surface, UMA’s oracle guarantees that every prediction, whether regarding elections, markets, or sports, can be settled securely and trustlessly.
The UMA-CTF adapter implemented on Polygon connects Polymarket’s conditional token framework (CTF) to UMA’s oracle, ensuring that every market resolution is verifiable.
Despite this vital role, UMA is largely overlooked by investors, who focus on Polymarket’s user-facing success. If sentiment shifts to acknowledge the importance of the oracle, UMA may experience considerable upside as the demand for on-chain data verification grows.
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2. Polygon (MATIC): The Chain Enabling Polymarket’s Scalability
Polymarket operates entirely on Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake network, leveraging its low-cost, high-speed infrastructure. The platform’s recent integration with X (Twitter) introduced on-chain prediction markets to over 600 million users, further extending their reach into the Polygon ecosystem.
Upcoming upgrades on Polygon (PIPs 60 and 43) promise enhancements, boosting throughput to 1,000 TPS and reducing finality to around 5 seconds, thereby directly improving the user experience for prediction markets.
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According to Polygon Labs, these upgrades will improve transaction capacity for applications like Polymarket, RWAs, and payments, reinforcing Polygon as the preferred chain for consumer-scale crypto applications.
“Polymarket’s success is beneficial for Polygon, Ethereum, and the entire crypto ecosystem,” stated Josh Stark, who collaborates with the Ethereum Foundation.
3. Ethereum (ETH): The Settlement Layer Underlying It All
Undoubtedly, Ethereum plays a pivotal role in Polymarket’s narrative, serving as the foundational layer that made its operation possible.
“Polymarket [was] not feasible without Ethereum USDC native with EVM wallets since 2020,” commented Nick Tomaino.
Polymarket’s dependence on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ensures access to the industry’s most extensive pool of developer talent, tools, and security infrastructure.
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The integration of USDC on Ethereum enhances seamless settlement for prediction markets.
As Ethereum’s Layer-2 ecosystem expands, including rollups like Katana, platforms like Polymarket gain even greater scalability opportunities.
Stark anticipates that this mutually beneficial relationship between Ethereum and its L2s will soon make building on EVM “the clear choice” for future innovative applications.
Polymarket’s valuation increase is not only a win for its investors, including CEO Shayne Coplan; it also validates the entire Ethereum-Polygon-UMA ecosystem.
While the focus is on the front-end platform, the true value may lie in the protocols that enable its trustless logic and scalability.
As prediction markets gain mainstream traction, these three altcoins could quietly become the most significant beneficiaries of Polymarket’s ascent.
