Public Prediction Markets Are Gambling‑First

Large retail prediction platforms have scaled to billions of dollars of volume but are dominated by sports, crypto and entertainment wagers rather than questions useful to policymakers. That demand composition means markets rarely produce the kind of credible, policy‑relevant signals their advocates promised without deliberate design and user diversification. — If public markets are primarily entertainment, regulators and institutions should not assume market prices are reliable inputs for policy or intelligence without verifying who is trading and why.