The crypto industry has always generated its fair share of speculators, for better or for worse. It's no wonder, then, why two of the hottest platforms in crypto—memecoin launchpad Pump.fun and decentralized prediction marketplace Polymarket—are built upon speculation.

Though, curiously, the platforms can be seen as inverses of one another. On Pump.fun, users speculate on memecoins that aside from their branding and community value have no intrinsic value proposition, meaning it should be hard to predict which coins are going to break through the noise and attract fans. On Polymarket, users are encouraged to use every bit of information at their disposal when trading positions on the market, predicting everything from political elections to how many times Elon Musk will tweet this week. 

But both platforms have seen a meteoric rise. Launched in January 2024, Pump.fun recently passed $100 million in total cumulative revenue generated for its developers, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard. Pump.fun's developers take a 1% fee on all transactions on its platform. Pump.fun even recently eliminated the cost for deploying a token, making it easier than ever for users to spin up a new memecoin. 

However, Pump.fun's daily revenue on Friday was the second-lowest single-day sum since May 24. Whether or not the launchpad can continue to incentivize users to create and trade memecoins will be critical to its future growth, lest the project comes to resemble friend.tech, a once-hot Web3 social platform that has essentially stopped making money over the past three months, according to The Block's data. 

Polymarket surpasses NFT volume

Not to be outdone, Polymarket also netted a notable achievement this month: doing more volume than all NFTs across all chains combined, according to The Block's data and CryptoSlam. While NFTs only logged about $377 million in volume over the past 30 days, Polymarket has seen $463 million in value traded on its platform. 

Polymarket's population of active traders has steadily increased since May as the 2024 Presidential Election draws closer, according to The Block's data. The platform even counts election forecaster Nate Silver as an advisor, though U.S. users are not officially permitted to use the site. 

The prediction marketplace currently shows former President Donald Trump with a slight lead over Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 Presidential Election. Nearly three-quarters of one billion dollars has been bet on the outcome.