What are the notable features of Melee, the new prediction market "handpicked" by the founder of Variant?

Jesse Walden: We believe that there will not be a winner-takes-all situation in the prediction market.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

At exactly midnight today in the East 8th time zone, the prediction market Melee officially announced a $3.5 million funding round on X, with participation from Variant and DBA. Jesse Walden, founder of Variant, personally wrote an introduction to this new prediction market, explaining the reasons for betting on it despite the existing competitive landscape.

Jesse Walden stated that Variant believes the prediction market is not a winner-takes-all market, but rather an emerging field like social networks, where many winners may emerge. Jesse Walden believes that prediction markets are still in their early stages, and just as social networks have continued to develop and differentiate across various dimensions such as media types, social graphs, and interest graphs, he expects prediction markets to follow a similar trajectory. Jesse Walden predicts that in the coming years, the intersection of markets and media will flourish, providing abundant design space for new types of market interactions, mechanisms, and vertical segments.

Why is Melee called a "viral market"?

Melee aims to build a permissionless prediction market, focusing on the concept of a "viral market," which includes three main features.

First, Melee allows the creation of any form of market. In addition to events with concrete outcomes such as sports matches and election results, Melee also supports the creation of "opinion markets" to understand people's views on trending topics. Melee states that this combination of fact-based and opinion-based markets allows people to discover the world's views on any topic, regardless of whether there is an objective answer.

Melee also enables creators to profit through participant engagement. Melee explains that for "opinion markets," streamers, commentators, journalists, and influencers can market any topic relevant to their audience and profit from trading volume. According to the author’s understanding, for example, an influencer could create a prediction market to let their fans decide which new city they should start streaming in. The voters for the most popular option would receive additional rewards, and the influencer could choose to satisfy the majority of their fans based on the result. For fans, voting with economic incentives can further stimulate participation.

In addition, Melee has designed a mechanism where the earlier you participate, the more you can profit, though the specific mechanism has not been disclosed. It is only mentioned that the mechanism does not require liquidity providers or market makers. Readers can follow Melee for further explanations on this aspect.

Let’s compare the information provided by Melee with the current largest Web3 prediction market, Polymarket:

When describing its vision, Melee stated that rather than just building a prediction market, they see Melee more as a platform for carrying and shaping culture. Jesse Walden further stated that Melee provides a sustainable way for influential individuals to monetize their influence without bearing reputational risk. By offering this monetization method to influential people, the platform and participants can mutually drive development, forming a positive cycle.

Integration of Web2 Giant Experience and Web3 Native Teams

The Melee team has considerable experience in the Web3 field. Co-founder and CEO Max previously served as Head of Strategy at Ava Labs and Chief Strategy Officer at NodeKit, and also created popular brands such as Dokis on TikTok; co-founder and CTO Kai previously worked at Microsoft and Amazon; CSO Kevin was a core systems engineer at Solana and Head of Developer Relations at Monad; COO Nick Preszler was a quantitative trader at Invesco and SIG.

Kai and Nick Preszler built the protocol architecture and prediction market algorithms, while Max and Kevin leveraged their Web3 industry experience to drive brand building and project development. This combination of strong technical background and Web3 project operation experience may also be an important reason for attracting investment institutions.

How to Participate

As an early-stage project, apart from a brief introduction, Melee has not provided much more information. Its official website only offers a Waitlist, and users can join by connecting their X account. If the popularity of prediction platforms continues, participating in Melee interactions could be a good opportunity to vie for airdrops.

The birth of Web3 prediction markets can be traced back to Augur, founded in 2014. Although the function remains similar, the lack of infrastructure and users at the time made Augur’s emergence akin to developing WeChat in the era of pagers. As Polymarket’s popularity surges, various prediction markets will undoubtedly spring up like mushrooms after rain. Broad participation in early activities of new prediction markets that receive institutional investment can help us find the "next HyperLiquid."