Listings are the New Moat
For every new wallet that traded on Polymarket from 2025-04-03 to 2026-04-09 we measured what were the first markets they traded.
Key findings:
By category count, crypto and politics onboarded the most new users
Each week had its own hot market of the week - regional elections, Fed interest rate decisions, and other miscellaneous hot topics of the week (Iran, Ukraine, Mr. Beast)
Crypto onboarding has largely been “Will BTC hit X” during times of high upside volatility
Sports / crypto has become a big onboarding funnel in 2026, whereas in 2025 it was politics and world events. We cautiously attribute this to “I built a profitable Polymarket trading bot using Openclaw” threads.
The top markets are by % of weekly new wallets are (x axis is top markets by their % share of their week’s new wallets, while y axis is the market in question ranked by highest %)
And the top 10 markets by new wallet count ever is:
Timely, culturally, politically relevant listings drive user acquisition. (We believe the Jesus Christ return market could have been airdrop farmers looking to receive market making / sponsorship rewards).
For a prediction market with access to an audience, timely diversified, culturally politically relevant listings are a moat. They drive new user growth and cross-sells into high revenue (high volume) fat tail products.
The dispersion is quite wide as well. There is no concentration of onboarding among 1-2 markets per week, rather 20+ even 50 new markets account for all onboarding flow.
Do Specific Users Who Onboard a Certain Way Retain Better?
These two graphs tell an interesting story
People LOVE esports markets; they absolutely love them
Sports and politics are overall great markets to list - very strong volume, very strong retention
There is much more churn on crypto than anywhere else. Perhaps due to market efficiency as there is a lot of competition in this market.
Tech is surprisingly a horrible market - it neither onboards a ton of users nor does it generate a ton of volume. Tech’s main purpose is to put Polymarket into traditional media (“odds that Gemini 3.5 Pro releases by X date is Y”). Particularly, private company valuation markets have abysmal volume compared to their perp or spot counterparts.
Ultimately everything is an onboarding funnel for sports, crypto and politics - all new listings in other markets are top-of-funnel for these deeper markets.
The only notable stat is that weather traders really love weather. Everyone else eventually cross-sells into crypto, sports and politics.
In aggregate this points to an important but now well understood mechanic of how to win in the exchange space. Listing - fast, topical and with day one liquidity to support - is a strong moat. People want to speculate on new topics, new markets and new stocks and the liquid venue to offer the ability to do so (for the given instrument) faster with more depth wins, then cross-sells those users onto their fat-tail products.
Originally posted on X.