Limitless CEO says no prediction market platform will dominate, citing perpetual futures precedent

Limitless Labs co-founder and CEO CJ Hetherington said he does not expect any single prediction market platform to dominate the category, comparing its likely trajectory to offshore perpetual futures exchanges where no operator has approached 90% market share.

Hetherington made the comments on a call hosted by Bernstein analysts Gautam Chhugani, Ian Moore and Nosher Ali Khan, who regularly cover Coinbase, Robinhood, DraftKings and Flutter.

No winner-take-all outcome

During the conversation, Hetherington pointed to Binance's perpetual futures market share, which peaked at roughly 50% before gradually eroding as rival exchanges gained traction, as the structural template for how prediction markets will evolve.

Hetherington stated that professional market makers and high-frequency traders generate most of the volume and fees in derivatives markets and multi-tenant across venues to arbitrage pricing differences.

In his view, this dynamic keeps several exchanges coexisting with comparable liquidity rather than consolidating around one winner.

"We already know some of the largest traders on other platforms are also the largest traders on our platform," Hetherington said, adding that those traders interact with Limitless purely through its API rather than its website.

Limitless, a Base-native prediction market platform that Hetherington co-founded in 2023, now clears close to $2 billion in monthly volume, according to Bernstein.

The platform is roughly 60% Asia-Pacific and 30% Europe by user base and has not yet launched for U.S. customers, pending regulatory approval.

Kalshi and Polymarket currently rank as the prediction market sector leaders, according to The Block's data.

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Distribution and the institutional opportunity

Hetherington said most distribution in the category will run through broker-dealers and futures commission merchants, pointing to Coinbase's continued distribution of Kalshi, Robinhood's shift toward its own exchange after previously distributing Kalshi, and the entry of Interactive Brokers and Charles Schwab.

He further said consumer-layer competition will center on fees and marketing spend, with advertising platforms and influencers capturing much of that value, comparing the dynamic to Citadel Securities' payments for Robinhood's order flow.

Hetherington also sized the U.S. sports betting opportunity for prediction markets at $6 billion to $10 billion in annual revenue over the next decade, a market he said Limitless does not plan to pursue aggressively.

He argued that the institutional and risk-transfer opportunity is roughly 10 times larger and is where Limitless intends to concentrate once it enters the U.S. market, while still calling $100 billion in category revenue over 15 years "not untenable."

Regulation as "a feature, not a bug"

Hetherington called the U.S. shift toward a rules-based regime "a feature, not a bug," saying CFTC-regulated products undergo more diligence on contract specifications and see fewer resolution disputes as a result.

Asked how prediction markets might avoid the fate of Betfair's exchange, where professional traders eventually drove away casual users, Hetherington said clear resolution rules are the determining factor.

Limitless’ co-founder stated that many of the disputes and controversies the industry has seen trace back to ambiguous contract terms rather than the presence of sophisticated traders themselves, and that CFTC-regulated products see far fewer of those disputes because of the scrutiny contract specifications receive before launch.

He added that insider trading is "very easy to catch" through onboarding and transaction surveillance, and flagged sports contracts as the most contested regulatory area given friction between state regulators and the CFTC.

Hetherington also said he is more concerned about insufficient regulation than excessive oversight, raising the possibility that a broad SEC exemption for tokenized equities could let them trade on a designated contract market without SEC approval, a scenario he said regulators "might regret later."

Skeptical of cross-category expansion

Hetherington was skeptical of cross-category expansion in either direction. He said he doesn't think it makes sense for Limitless to launch on-chain perpetual futures, and was equally doubtful about Hyperliquid's prospects in prediction markets, an idea he said investors raised constantly months ago, but that has produced little traction.

Hetherington compared the speculation to early-2000s questions about whether Google might build a prediction market, noting that once Google actually tried it, the idea faded from conversation. He said the lack of momentum behind Hyperliquid's prediction market push suggests either that building real liquidity in the category is harder than commonly assumed, or that volume on rival platforms is more inflated than it appears.

Retention metrics are "stupid numbers"

Limitless is currently rebating 100% of its revenue to market makers as it prioritizes growth, Hetherington said, and cautioned that headline retention figures of 80% to 90% across the industry are "stupid numbers" inflated by automated trading rather than genuine user loyalty.

He said the top 5% to 10% of users generate the vast majority of platform volume, noting that a single "user" account can represent a trading desk with dozens of people behind it.

The comments come as Bernstein has separately projected the 2026 FIFA World Cup will drive a $5 billion to $10 billion uplift in consumer prediction market volumes, part of a broader forecast that the sector reaches $1 trillion in annual volume by 2030.