Leveraged prediction market infrastructure with serious microstructure
Ultramarkets is building the leverage layer for prediction markets — an attempt to turn prediction markets into a full-stack financial product with higher capital efficiency, better tooling, and more serious traders.
The broader vision is a new market structure for event-based trading: primitives that make prediction markets more liquid, more expressive, and closer to the products traders already understand in traditional derivatives markets.
How leverage and risk controls turn prediction markets into real markets
Most prediction markets today look like betting apps: binary outcomes, limited liquidity, and capital trapped in long-dated positions. Real markets have leverage, hedging, and risk controls — the microstructure that lets professional traders show up and price information honestly. Ultramarkets is building that microstructure for event-based trading, applying the same logic we describe in Liquidity, Leverage and the Price of Risk to a new asset class. It connects our Simple Finance thesis to the AI-driven market structure we explore in AI as Leverage.
Why LAVA invested in Ultramarkets
The team (originally Liquid) was first building a simple USD savings product with yield for users in Nigeria — taking lessons we'd learnt together from InstaDapp. Lacking PMF there, they pivoted to leverage for prediction markets, and the new product has the same technical seriousness and clarity of design.
If prediction markets become a major venue for information and risk transfer, the leverage and execution layer is a powerful, defensible position in the emerging market structure.