The news: XO Market closed a $6 million seed round led by 20VC, Picus Capital, and Coinbase Ventures to build what it’s calling the “YouTube of prediction markets,” or in simple terms, a platform where users create and run their own markets rather than trading on a curated list set by the platform. Since its mainnet beta launched in mid-November, XO has generated more than $150M in trading volume, attracted over 30,000 users, and has more than 600 active user-created markets.

Zoom in: The upstart is positioning itself as an alternative to the current incumbent market leaders. “Today’s major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket act more like Netflix,” co-founder Ali Habbabeh told CoinDesk. “They decide what markets exist. We’ve flipped that model entirely. On XO, users create the markets themselves.” Coming next is XO Vaults, a product that lets users pool capital to provide liquidity across markets (targeting annual yields of 8–10%), which is set to take aim at the professional market-making firms that currently dominate that layer.

Why it matters: Competing user-generated platforms like Nine Lives and Warm Protocol have struggled to convert the concept into meaningful liquidity, so XO’s real test is whether or not the model can scale without fragmenting into a graveyard of illiquid markets. If XO can solve the liquidity problem through vaults and community incentives, the user-generated model could carve out a meaningful niche—especially for niche events that curated platforms might ignore.

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