Primitive Ventures: Predicting the “East-West Divergence” in the Market – Why We Bets on Opinion Labs

Author: Yetta , Investment Partner at Primitive Ventures; Wildon, Research Fellow at Primitive Ventures

With a weekly trading volume of $1.5 billion and a cumulative trading volume exceeding $10 billion within 60 days, while everyone applauded Polymarket's $13 billion valuation and its high-profile partnership with the NYSE, this platform from the East, still in its "seed stage," quietly achieved a bottom-up breakthrough. This is our complete investment assessment of Opinion Labs.

The era of single-player NPCs is coming to an end.

For decades, we've lived in a "single-player game." Truth is produced by a few institutions, narratives are finalized in conference rooms, and most of us are merely NPCs moving along a predetermined plot. Web2 gives us a voice, but it doesn't truly involve us in deciding the direction. How beliefs are formed and how consensus is shaped remains locked within the black box of algorithms and power structures.

But what if beliefs themselves could be fluid and priced?

• Opinions are not just about expressing attitudes, but about making bets.

• The disagreement is not just an emotional confrontation, but a divergence in prices.

• Consensus is not measured by the number of shares, but by a curve that could reverse at any moment.

• Reality is no longer a script to be watched, but a game involving multiple participants.

The paradox of not being so "long tail"

Whether prediction markets are financial markets or content markets is an interesting debate. As a financial market, it performs exceptionally well in a few specific scenarios. Without liquidity, there are no prices; without prices, there are no signals. Mechanisms like order books, market makers, and market depth function very smoothly during events with high global attention, such as the US presidential election, but they begin to malfunction once these scenarios are removed.

Human attention is inherently fragmented. Most of what we truly care about is highly contextual and geographically dependent, such as cultural gossip, local politics, celebrity scandals, and various social topics. The internet hasn't brought these interests together; instead, it has allowed them to branch out infinitely. Content is exploding, but capital and liquidity will always be scarce.

Thus, the paradox arises:

• For a market to be efficient, it needs concentration.

• Human opinions, however, are naturally scattered.

If a platform can only maintain liquidity by relying on a few top events, it's more like an "event exchange" than a true market that fosters belief-based competition. So the question becomes: how do you build a financial system on top of information when it refuses to converge?

Why We Invested in Opinion Labs

A year ago, we invested in @opinionlabsxyz . At that time, Polymarket had just completed its first large-scale validation during the election cycle, and Prediction Market had become one of the strongest narratives in the Western VC circle. We judged that the East would not be absent from such a content/event-driven approach, so we approached Opinion and completed the investment. Six months later, the discussion of Prediction Market spread to Asia and to BNBChain. At that moment, the only one with a mature product that could be launched immediately and take advantage of the momentum was Opinion.

More importantly, they reached this scale with almost zero capital expenditure. In terms of product pace, execution density, and output per capita, they are one of the most efficient teams we have ever seen.

East ≠ West: Market Prediction is Diverging

The prediction market is showing a clear East-West divergence, and the reason is actually quite simple. Assets can converge globally, but opinions cannot. The US dollar, gold, and US stocks can form a unified price, but what people are willing to bet on is itself a cultural product. The prerequisite for the true expansion of the prediction market is liquidity, but even more so, shared attention.

In the United States, this shared attention is extremely concentrated. Sports betting has cultivated retail investor habits for decades, and politics has long since evolved into a national reality show. Attention naturally converges on a few mega-events. Kalshi and Polymarkets have naturally converged on the top markets, serving high-frequency and professional traders with thicker order books.

The situation in East Asia is entirely different. In China, the space for political discussion is limited; in Japan, retail investors generally have low levels of political participation; and in South Korea, users' attention is more focused on speculation, entertainment, social issues, and popular culture. In different markets, what retail investors truly care about and what they have sufficient knowledge to express their judgments varies greatly.

This difference is very evident in the data. In the context of the 2026 South Korean presidential election, Polymarket's trading volume was approximately $400,000, while Opinion Labs reached $52 million. Prediction markets cannot be winner-takes-all because belief formation is highly localized.

When shared attention is absent, liquidity does not automatically concentrate; instead, it naturally disperses. This is precisely the structure we are observing: compared to Polymarket and Kalshi, Opinion's trading distribution is significantly more dispersed. Trading volume has not collapsed to a few top events but has been consistently distributed across the mid-to-long-tail markets that a large number of offshore users are truly interested in.

AI as a key to scaling

Human-driven market creation is no longer keeping pace with the times. When opinions are limitless and contexts are highly localized, relying on manual screening and listing will force the prediction market to converge on a few top events.

This is precisely why AI has become indispensable.

At Opinion Labs, AI transforms fragmented claims into structured marketplaces: it automatically generates clear settlement rules, defines failure boundaries, and uses staking mechanisms to constrain behavior and strengthen accountability. Marketplace creation no longer relies on the judgment of a few editorial or operational teams but can be scaled up. Numerous local marketplaces with cultural and regional characteristics can be rapidly generated without being overwhelmed by low-quality content.

As markets extend into the long tail, the real challenge lies in settlement. Long-tail markets often rely on complex, fragmented, and unstructured information sources. A single adjudication mechanism cannot handle this complexity. AI can handle information cross-referencing and verification at scale, while hardware-level security and human governance serve as a last resort.

This means that, for the first time, prediction markets could potentially expand horizontally. Instead of focusing global attention on a few mega-events, it allows beliefs themselves to be organized, traded, and verified in a highly decentralized world.

Prediction Market 2.0: One Paradigm, Two Evolutions

In the prediction market, a clear divide is emerging between Chinese and Western approaches.

The West opted for financialization and institutionalization. This is why we see the founder of IB stating that the most frequently traded contracts are weather/temperature contracts. More broadly, industries like energy, agriculture, and shipping are constantly exposed to climate risks but have consistently lacked sufficiently sophisticated and tradable hedging tools. In this context, the development of the prediction market has shifted to whether it can achieve scalable liquidity, create sufficiently robust derivative structures, and be understood and accepted by institutional risk control systems. Entrepreneurs are considering how to refine it into a qualified financial infrastructure.

The East, on the other hand, has moved towards internetization and content creation. It's more like an entertainment-oriented mechanism for information consumption and expression. In this context, the core is when and why users are willing to bet. It's a form of content monetization: betting represents participation, odds represent narrative intensity, and trading volume represents emotional consensus. The product doesn't need to solve complex financial engineering problems, but rather a content operation logic—that is, how to transform trending topics, public opinion, and social discussions into sustained trading motivations.

The Prediction Market has entered its 2.0 phase. It is no longer a single, winner-takes-all market, but rather two different evolutionary paths shaped by different cultures. Both point to a larger change: the market is no longer merely a venue for trading outcomes, but has been atomized into the mechanism itself for handling uncertainty.