USDC Powers Polymarket as 60% of Users Skip DEXs in Bitget Study

Crypto News

Prediction markets have quietly become a primary on-ramp into crypto, according to a new behavioral study from Bitget Wallet. Reviewing 90 days of activity across 857,377 Polymarket users, the report found that roughly 60% of active participants had never traded on a decentralized exchange before placing their first prediction-market position. The traditional sequence into the space — wallet, then DEX, then swaps, then DeFi — is being reordered, with many newcomers arriving through event-based betting rather than token speculation. Bitget Wallet, an AI crypto wallet, frames this as a structural shift in how first-time users reach on-chain finance, with usability now outweighing protocol knowledge as the entry barrier.

Activity surged alongside major sporting events, the study found. During the mid-June 2026 FIFA World Cup kickoff, total daily volume across prediction platforms approached $6 billion — roughly five times the prior week's level — as casual audiences flooded in around fixtures and outcomes. That spike illustrates how event-driven demand, rather than market cycles, increasingly dictates inflows to these venues. Our reading of the data suggests prediction markets are capturing a mainstream user that conventional crypto products have struggled to reach, turning real-world events into the trigger for a user's first on-chain transaction and reshaping how exchanges and wallets compete for new accounts.

Engagement concentrates inside the prediction app rather than spilling into broader DeFi, the report shows. Users more dependent on Polymarket averaged 1,194.5 settled trades over 90 days, against just 11.9 trades on any DEX. Where users did touch a DEX, 79% of that volume came from stablecoin swaps and major layer-1 and layer-2 altcoin trades, while memecoins accounted for only 1%. Among large accounts moving more than $100,000 with zero DEX activity, 89% of inflowing USD Coin (USDC) merely circulated between in-platform wallets. The pattern signals that DEX infrastructure is becoming invisible plumbing beneath app-native experiences.

Institutional interest is accelerating in parallel. The parent of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), has moved to commit roughly $2 billion in strategic investment to Polymarket, a striking endorsement of prediction markets as a regulated-adjacent asset class. The platform is also preparing a formal push into Japan, appointing a local representative and targeting official government approval by 2030. Stablecoins remain the connective tissue of this expansion: the study underscores how dollar-pegged tokens, rather than volatile algorithmic stablecoins, serve as the default settlement asset that lets non-crypto-native users participate without holding speculative tokens.

Bitget also opened the third edition of its Anti-Scam Month, publishing an Anti-Scam Report 2026 produced with blockchain-security firm SlowMist. The report documents how fraud is mutating across a multi-asset era spanning cryptocurrencies, tokenized assets, stocks and AI-driven investment tools. One striking shift stands out: the share of users active across two or more asset classes climbed from under 1% in mid-2025 to more than 10% by May 2026. As investors spread across products, scam campaigns increasingly blend several narratives, social-engineering tactics and AI trading bot impersonations into a single coordinated operation rather than relying on one point of compromise.

The scale of intercepted abuse is substantial. Between July 2025 and June 2026, Bitget's security systems intercepted more than 150 million malicious requests, flagged over 13,000 high-risk IP addresses, handled 18,135 user-protection cases and supported recovery of $32.3 million tied to fraud and security incidents. The report catalogs AI-generated investment personas, deepfake-enabled scams and wallet-draining operations, including a deepfake campaign impersonating Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and a synthetic-community scheme built on roughly 90 fabricated investor identities. CEO Gracy Chen warned that fraudsters now build trust across messaging apps, fake communities and phishing infrastructure before any assets are moved.

Our reading ties these threads together: as prediction markets pull first-time users on-chain through stablecoins rather than DEXs, the industry's attack surface widens just as fast as its user base. COINOTAG's aggregate data underscores the caution — our Fear & Greed Index sits at 13, deep in Extreme Fear, Bitcoin dominance holds at 70.2%, and total crypto market capitalization stands near $1.69 trillion. In a defensive market where capital crowds into Bitcoin, frictionless app-native entry points are a powerful growth lever, but the same simplicity that onboards newcomers also shortens the path for fraud. Education and on-chain security, not usability alone, will decide whether this new on-ramp endures.