A New Prediction Market Raises $3M in Pre-Seed Round Led by 1confirmation

Limitless Labs, a fledgling entrant to the booming prediction market business, raised $3 million in a pre-seed round led by early stage venture fund 1confirmation.

Paper Ventures, Collider and Public Works participated in the round, said CJ Hetherington, co-founder and CEO of Limitless Labs, the company building the market on top of Base, the layer-2 blockchain network created by crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN).

The raise comes at a time when election betting, particularly the kind denominated in cryptocurrency, is all the rage, led by Polymarket, which has amassed nearly $1 billion of wagers on the outcome of the U.S. presidential race. But Hetherington said Limitless, whose eight-person team has been building its markets for about six months, isn't focused on the election.

One of its specialties is markets that expire quickly, typically concerning the price of a stock or cryptocurrency at the end of a trading day. On Monday, for example, its largest market by volume asked traders to bet whether Coinbase's stock would close above $175 at 4 p.m. Eastern time. Hetherington likened these to the zero day to expiration (0DTE) options popular in traditional finance.

"People love the daily markets because they don't have to lock up their money for a long period of time to get some mediocre returns," Hetherington said. And the turnover keeps traders coming back.

"The average trader we have on the platform right now is spending around four hours per week," Hetherington said. "So the retention is really, really high. I mean, like 38% of users that come on the first day come after the seventh day, according to our recent data."

Limitless remains a pipsqueak compared to Polymarket. A Limitless representative said it is processing more than $200,000 in daily transactions, whereas daily volume on Polymarket is in the tens of millions according to Dune Analytics data. Limitless has no external market-makers yet. "We are about to start those conversations," Hetherington said.

Its other differentiator (for now) is user-generated markets. Users with large enough social media followings can suggest markets. If a suggestion makes the Limitless homepage and generates trades, the user can earn rewards, calculated as a single-digit percentage of the volume.

"A lot of the most popular markets on our platform were not created by us," Hetherington said. "They were created by members of our community, and they've been earning money."

At least one other prediction market, Hedgehog Markets, has something similar in the works.

UPDATE (Sept. 17, 2024, 13:23 UTC): Corrects company name in first paragraph, typo in sixth.