Prediction markets are hitting a fever pitch, with both Polymarket and Kalshi recently achieving unicorn status. 

That’s nice, but you still can’t create your own markets on these platforms though. Today, we look at an upcoming player that wants to enable just that: XO Market.

— Donovan

Bitcoin MVRV-Z score stays tame:

Every few months, I like to revisit a suggestion from 1000x podcast host Jonah van Bourg. So given it’s the start of a new month and the third quarter, let’s check it out!

The “rule of thumb” to help gauge where we are in the market cycle is — “exit when Bitcoin’s MVRV-Z > 6.0.”

The MVRV-Z score tracks how far Bitcoin’s market value is above its realized value (adjusted for volatility), and has historically marked major tops — around 6-to-8.

Today’s chart shows the current MVRV-Z hovering well below that red-alert zone, even after bitcoin’s strong rally past $100,000.

The indicator reflects a market that’s heating up but hasn’t reached the kind of euphoric overvaluation seen in prior peaks. Jonah’s guess is that the next true blow-off top — and his personal exit signal — might arrive in 2026 or 2027, perhaps around $250,000. Until then, this chart suggests the cycle still has room to run.

But of course, past performance is no guarantee…

— Macauley Peterson

Blockchain is shaping a radically different economy, with 10% of global GDP predicted to be tokenized onchain by 2027. The technology is disrupting key industries worldwide — upending the conventional way of doing business while transforming customer experiences.

How might this evolution play out over the next quarter century? A new special report from Blockworks Research and OKX answers this question, drawing from interviews and research conducted across the leaders of finance, technology, retail, and entertainment. 

Here comes another prediction market

The below picture of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was from a recent NATO summit.

Is that a suit Zelenskyy is wearing?

The New York Post called it a suit, The Sun called it a “slick black suit”, and Reuters called it a “suit-style jacket”.

But ChatGPT disagrees:

Anyway, the answer to that incredibly inane question is key now largely thanks to a Polymarket bet (Will Zelenskyy wear a suit before July?) with $12 million of open interest riding on it.

Unfortunately for bettors, mainstream media opinion is not the final resort of resolution on Polymarket — that decision lies with UMA token holders.

UMA whales are disputing that Zelenskyy was wearing a suit, so the market has currently cratered to a 3% implied probability of resolving to a “YES” vote now. 

That has hilariously sparked activist Twitter pages like “ZELENSKYY WORE A SUIT,” accusations of oracle capture and what some are calling “Suitgate.”

I’m not here to referee Zelenskyy’s wardrobe debate.

I only wish to point out that newer prediction markets are catching on to this problem and innovating new ways to mitigate this “buy-the-truth” problem that can emerge on UMA.

Inside XO Market

Take XO Market, an upcoming prediction market built as a sovereign appchain using Celestia for data availability.

To eliminate oracle capture, XO Market’s oracle system is designed to be AI-first. The oracle queries “trusted APIs” and “uses algorithmic data retrieval and machine learning to quickly determine objectively verifiable outcomes,” according to its whitepaper.

Only in the event of a rare dispute does the resolution kick up to a similar jury system, where staked XO token holders are randomly selected to decide. Quadratic voting mechanisms are also implemented to deter the influence of any single large token holder from dominating a market’s outcome.

Then the market resolves in accordance with majority vote. Minority token holders are slashed.

XO Market also wants to be permissionless, in contrast to Polymarket or Kalshi where markets are subject to approval from central gatekeepers.

Think a marriage between pump[dot]fun and Polymarket, Ali Habbabeh, co-founder of XO Market, tells me.

Any user with a hot take can draft a question, define resolution criteria, choose any collateral and set a fee to earn on all trades, so good questions become a revenue stream.

Allowing creators to use any token they wish leads to liquidity fragmentation, but it also enables different communities to introduce utility to their own tokens through what Habbabeh likes to think of as “conviction markets.”

To bootstrap liquidity for a long tail of niche markets, XO depends on a kind of adaptive liquidity AMM, or what some may remember as Augur’s Liquidity-Sensitive Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule (LS-LMSR).

The general idea is that creators start by seeding a market for a few dollars, then graduate to deep liquidity over time as trading volume increases.

This design lies in contrast to Polymarket’s liquidity model that relies on professional market-makers. Niche markets are therefore ignored until makers are convinced it is worth their capital.

“LMSR was very compute intensive and that's why Augur died,” Habbabeh tells me, “It's the best pricing algorithm for prediction markets and nobody's using it.”

An orderbook may be eventually used for when adoption scales, he added.

XO Market is launching open alpha this week.

The team recently emerged as one of the winners at Celestia’s Mammothon hackathon and subsequently closed a $500,000 pre-seed round led by Cyber Fund and Delphi Ventures.

The prediction markets landscape

XO Market’s alpha launch comes in the backdrop of both Polymarket and Kalshi achieving unicorn status.

Bloomberg reported last week that Polymarket was raising $200 million at a $1 billion valuation. Kalshi on the other hand recently closed a Paradigm-led $185 million round at a $2 billion valuation.

Polymarket’s open interest has held generally steady at the $100 million-$120 million mark in the last several months.

— Donovan Choy

Botanix spiderchain releases mainnet

Botanix Labs has launched its mainnet, delivering what it calls the first fully decentralized, EVM-equivalent Bitcoin layer-2. Live today, Botanix offers Ethereum-style DeFi — trading, borrowing, lending, staking — natively in bitcoin, with five-second blocks and ~$0.02 fees.


Unlike custodial bridges or static federated sidechains, Botanix features a “Spiderchain” architecture: BTC-staked Orchestrator nodes chosen via Bitcoin block hash randomness manage a rotating multisig peg, with state anchored back to Bitcoin for auditability.


This week, Botanix also finalized its 16-node founding federation, including Galaxy and Fireblocks, removing Botanix Labs from operational control and planning permissionless expansion to 100+ nodes.


“One of the interesting things about the Spiderchain is you can immediately withdraw back to Bitcoin, so you won't have any liquidation or redeemability risks,” CEO Willem Schroé told Blockworks.


At launch, apps like GMX and Dolomite are live for trading and lending. Rover enables liquid BTC staking, with yields funded by network gas fees — BTC is the gas token. Bitcoin-collateralized stablecoin PUSD is offered by Palladium, using the Liquity V1 design of a flat 0.5% fee loan.


With a faucet campaign and retro-futuristic game “Bitcoin 2100,” Botanix aims to onboard Bitcoiners to a DeFi ecosystem designed around Bitcoin’s core principles.

— Macauley Peterson