Gondor

This past year has been a breakout year for prediction markets in which they’ve established themselves as mainstream financial and information markets. And while most of the attention has gone to them as end-user destinations, they’re increasingly becoming developer platforms too.

Both Polymarket and Kalshi, the two leading prediction markets, allow developers to build on top of them. A growing ecosystem of third-party apps is emerging that promises to meaningfully enhance the experience for everyone who uses these markets.

Today we’re excited to share that we’re leading the pre-seed round for Gondor, a company building the DeFi layer for prediction markets. They’re starting on Polymarket, offering borrowing, lending, and leverage to users who want more ways to express their views or manage risk. Because every position on Polymarket is a token settled on Ethereum, these assets can be used across DeFi in all sorts of ways.

Onchain prediction markets create a wide surface area for developers to build products on top. Polymarket has been onchain from day one, and earlier this week Kalshi, which was originally an offchain platform, announced that it is launching a version of its product on Solana. Positions there will now be tokenized as well, opening the door for developers to build new experiences around them.

Gondor’s founder, Arsenii, has been deep in prediction markets for years. He was one of the first people to withdraw Polymarket positions to an external wallet, a moment that made it clear just how much could be built by treating these tokenized positions like any other token in DeFi.

The potential of prediction markets as both new markets and open developer platforms is enormous. Giving developers room to innovate on top of them will ultimately not only strengthen the underlying platforms, but also deliver better experiences to the end users who participate in them.