Markets also tend to be good at prediction. An election market created by three economists at the University of Iowa in 1988 beat the polls in at least three elections, and on Wall Street, futures markets have proved very good at forecasting.

Considering this brief history, it’s somewhat curious that prediction markets haven’t gained wider traction. Other examples of futures markets—like the Hollywood Stock Exchange, launched in 1996 to let traders wager on box office results, and PredictIt, a forecasting site founded in 2014—have repeatedly faced pushback from both institutions and regulators.

But today’s prediction-market boom seems destined to last, for two reasons. The first is that these markets have found unusually warm support in Washington under the second Trump administration, where they are treated like the hottest new civic innovation project. Devin Nunes, the former congressman and current CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group, has described them as tools that “empower everyday Americans to harness the wisdom of the crowd.” Donald Trump Jr. serves as a special adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and in October, Truth Social announced plans to launch a prediction market of its own called Truth Predict.

The second reason is subtler. Prediction markets are gaining momentum in an era when experts have burned through their authority, institutional knowledge is almost universally scorned, and shared reality is splintering into an algorithmic hall of mirrors. The pollsters miss the polls, the networks can’t agree on the facts, and Trump’s government is backpedaling on two centuries’ worth of scientific consensus.

Perhaps these problems can be solved by putting a price on truth and turning it into a commodity. “It’s a very elegant, very free market–based approach,” says Mansour. “We’re giving a financial incentive, rewarding people that have valuable information for society to bring into the marketplace.”

Already these markets are viewed as a convincing barometer for truth. Saul Munn, a 22-year-old who studies philosophy at Berkeley and hosts forecasting events at universities, tells me that when he wants to know what’s going on in the world, he is more likely to check the odds on Kalshi than watch CNN. “The [traders] make a lot of money from being right,” he says. “One guy is incentivized to get clicks. The other guy is incentivized to make money.” Never mind that prediction markets often rely on reporting from CNN to settle their bets.

While boosters promise tidy yes-or-no wagers, in practice, traders sometimes spend days parsing ambiguous contracts in Kalshi’s and Polymarket’s Discord servers. Perhaps the most famous example of this was a bet on Polymarket that asked whether Volodymyr Zelenskyy would wear a suit by a certain date. When the Ukrainian president stepped out in a tailored-​looking outfit, traders tore one another apart debating the definition of the word suit. The market, which ultimately determined its outcome through what the company described as “credible reporting,” resolved to “no”—to no one’s lasting satisfaction.

Despite all the ambiguity, prediction markets’ biggest backers—Silicon Valley venture capitalists—remain undeterred. It used to be that the medium was the message. In Silicon Valley, the line has been updated: “The markets are the message,” says one venture communications executive. That gospel has set off a frenzy. “Since the election, so many people have started building prediction markets,” says Arad Gishri, an investor based in Portugal. Some of these people are founders whose “products didn’t catch on, and so they pivoted to prediction. It’s like dozens and dozens and dozens. Like, really. A lot. And it’s still happening.” Gishri, too, has caught the bug: Earlier this year he left his job as a venture capitalist to start his own prediction market called Lightcone Labs.