The socialization of prediction trading can also leverage.
Written by: ChandlerZ, Foresight News.
From the end of June this year to late August, Flipr's price performance has been remarkable. Two months ago, its market capitalization was less than $2 million, with almost no attention. As of August 27, the project's market capitalization has risen to a peak of $21 million, an increase of over one hundred times, with a rise of 16 times just in August.
So, what exactly is Flipr? In simple terms, it is not a new prediction market, but rather a social entry point for prediction markets. Unlike Polymarket or Kalshi, which require independent platforms and interfaces, Flipr has chosen a lighter approach: directly embedding within the social platform X.
What is Flipr: The 'social layer' of prediction markets.
Flipr officially launched on July 2025, with the core entry point being the trading bot Fliprbot operating on the X platform. Unlike traditional prediction markets that require jumping to independent websites, browsing market lists, connecting wallets, and then betting, Flipr compresses the entire process into social conversations.
Users only need to tag @fliprbot on X or enter a natural language command in a direct message, such as 'Will Donald Trump win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025?' and specify the direction and amount of the bet to complete the transaction directly. The betting information then appears on the timeline as content, becoming a social event that can be replicated, shared, and questioned by others. Essentially, Flipr integrates trading and posting, making each bet publicly visible.
To lower the entry barrier, Flipr has integrated Privy's account system at the base level and introduced derivative functions such as leveraged trading and stop-loss orders. Betting is no longer an isolated action after a transition but a natural extension within the conversation context. Flipr even supports group chats and community embedding, allowing group administrators to create markets instantly in discussions, enabling users to bet while discussing, making the prediction function a part of social interaction like chat stickers.
The logic behind this design is clear. Traditional prediction markets are more like tools for professional speculators, while Flipr hopes to make trading part of social interaction. However, it does not directly compete with Polymarket or Kalshi but chooses to reach users at the front end. Polymarket and Kalshi provide trading depth and compliance, while Flipr offers visibility and shareability. For prediction markets, this is a complementary relationship. Flipr acts as an amplifier, bringing originally specialized trading behavior into the popular social scene.
This product logic determines its communication advantages. Betting becomes a dynamic that can be shared, commented on, and challenged. The expression of opinions and financial betting overlap in the same space, amplifying the visibility of transactions across the entire social network. Flipr transforms prediction markets from a tool into content, and the content's diffusibility is key to its rapid rise in popularity.
On July 7, Flipr launched the Mindshare Mining event, lasting six weeks, with a total of 10 million FLIPR tokens distributed as rewards.
Unlike common transaction mining, it does not simply reward trading volume but has designed a more complex scoring system that aims to combine betting and social interaction. The scoring calculation covers five dimensions: the larger the trading scale, the higher the score a user receives, which is the most intuitive part; the timing of posts is also taken into account, with content published earliest in the week having greater weight, thus encouraging users to participate promptly; consecutive postings are given extra rewards; at the same time, the project team has built constraints against spam content into the mechanism, where excessively frequent postings will incur score deductions to avoid meaningless information flooding the community; users' post interactions are also counted, with the number of likes, comments, and shares directly affecting the final score.
The landscape of prediction markets and the future of Flipr.
The rapid rise of Flipr actually makes sense within the development context of the prediction market track. Over the past year, Polymarket and Kalshi have proven the scale and potential of prediction markets, but neither has launched a token, which has led to a lack of narrative-bearing assets for capital. Thus, hot money naturally flowed toward Flipr, which has a small market capitalization but carries the prediction market label.
At the same time, the popularity of prediction markets continues to accumulate. Polymarket achieved a trading volume of over $9 billion in 2024, with a monthly peak of $2.6 billion during the U.S. elections, firmly occupying the leading position among crypto-native prediction platforms. Kalshi, with CFTC approval, rapidly expanded in the compliance sector, nearing $2 billion in trading volume in 2024, and reaching a post-financing valuation of $2 billion in 2025. Over the past two years, prediction markets have grown from a marginal experiment to a rapidly growing niche.
According to official information, Flipr is currently connected to Polymarket and will soon connect to Kalshi. Flipr does not attempt to compete with giants in liquidity or compliance but focuses on the front-end experience. The X platform has 150 million active users daily, who are already in an event-driven and emotional expression environment. Flipr embeds prediction markets into this scenario, overlapping betting with posting, thereby lowering the entry barrier for users. For Polymarket and Kalshi, this 'social layer' may be a missing link for them.
More importantly, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly expressed his support for prediction markets on multiple occasions. Over the past two years, Vitalik has become the number one advocate for prediction markets, repeatedly emphasizing their role in 'information accuracy' and 'cognitive correction.' He pointed out that in token voting mechanisms, selecting the wrong result has almost no penalties, whereas in prediction markets, incorrect judgments result in real economic losses. This mechanism forces participants to be more rational and often allows market prices to provide more accurate probabilities than media public opinion. For him personally, prediction markets help him stay calm, preventing the amplification of event importance by social media emotions, while also signaling when significant events actually occur. Vitalik thus views prediction markets as a social technology that can enhance rationality at the group level, highly aligning with the open governance goals of blockchain.
At the same time, he frequently discusses the application potential and improvement directions of prediction markets. Vitalik pointed out that most prediction markets currently lack interest compensation, which limits their appeal as hedging tools. However, if this issue can be resolved in the future, related markets will generate a large number of hedging applications, and trading volume will significantly increase. He also views prediction markets in conjunction with artificial intelligence, believing that AI-driven prediction markets can provide new pathways for community fact-checking, DAO arbitration, and even automated market making. For example, he envisions embedding prediction markets in the 'community notes' feature of X, using AI and small betting incentives to accelerate the confirmation of factual truth. Vitalik even lists prediction markets and community notes as the two flagship social cognition technologies of the 2020s, arguing that they are built on public participation rather than elite control, and are important tools for promoting decentralized social governance.
The key question for the future is whether Flipr can convert this short-term explosion into long-term stable growth. After the Mindshare Mining incentive program ends, if there are no new mechanisms to maintain popularity, user activity may decline. If collaboration with Kalshi can further materialize, Flipr has the opportunity to become the social front end of compliant prediction trading in the U.S. market, which would bring new growth opportunities.
