#预测市场平台与套利 Seeing this wave of Polymarket Arbitrage excitement, I felt a familiar sensation. The futures market over a decade ago, the DEX arbitrage from a few years back, every time a new ecosystem matures, it goes through a phase like this — liquidity fragmentation, widening price differences, and smart money flocking in.

What is the essence of Igor's article? It discusses how when the market is still in an inefficient state, pricing discrepancies across platforms can be locked in for an annualized return of 40%. But don't be blinded by this number—it precisely indicates that Polymarket is still very primitive. The frequent price differences between Kalshi and Polymarket appear to be arbitrage opportunities, but in reality, they reflect that both platforms have serious liquidity issues.

What is most interesting is that the CEO candidly admitted to operating at a loss, with the priority being to capture market share. This is said honestly. Why? Because he knows that predicting market price differences is essentially a variation of transaction costs—only now they are being consumed by arbitrageurs. Once the market matures and liquidity deepens, these arbitrage opportunities will quickly converge to just a few basis points. By then, the returns from running such strategies will drop from an annualized 40% to 4%, or even lower.

I have seen too many cycles like this. The air coins of 2017, the early Uniswap arbitrage of 2020, the NFT floor price differences of 2021 — each time attracting a group of people to engage in "risk-free arbitrage", and then the market self-corrects, the price differences disappear, and participants disperse. The current situation of Polymarket is a typical symptom of early-stage market development.

So how should I look at this? Arbitrage itself is not a problem, and the mechanism is clear. But the risk warnings must be understood: liquidity traps, black swan events (like the assassination risk mentioned by Igor), platform rule changes—these are the things that can truly wipe out your principal. An annualized return of 40% sounds tempting, but the premise is that you have to survive until that day when the profits are realized.

I am still optimistic about the future of prediction markets, but this wave of arbitrage frenzy? It's just an inevitable bubble in the process of the market moving from inefficiency to efficiency. The smart approach is to understand the arbitrage mechanism, but don't mistake short-term price differences for long-term sources of profit.