Polymarket's two actions this week are worth watching together:

Starting to charge for 15-minute crypto markets (up to 3%), with all fees fully refunded to market makers
Becoming an exclusive prediction market partner for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones

The first move isn't about making money; it's about combating latency arbitrage bots. Short-term crypto markets are most vulnerable to high-frequency bots exploiting them. Using dynamic fee curves to push them out allows genuine market makers to survive. This is a technical aspect of market design.

The second move carries a greater signaling significance. When mainstream financial media like WSJ start citing prediction market data, it means they no longer see it as a crypto toy but as a "trustworthy information aggregation tool."

Looking ahead, in which scenarios will prediction markets penetrate?

The most direct are finance and insurance industries. Hedge funds can use prediction markets to price tail risks, and reinsurance companies can evaluate the probability of extreme events. These scenarios naturally have enough professional participants, so liquidity isn't an issue.

Further out, it could be internal decision-making markets within large corporations. Companies like Google and Microsoft, with thousands of employees, can predict product launches and project progress more honestly than traditional surveys. But small businesses find it hard to play; markets with only a few dozen people can't support effective price discovery.

But the core premise is: market quality must be able to support these applications. Markets with fuzzy rules, poor liquidity, or unreliable dispute resolution mechanisms are not suitable for decision-making.

Polymarket is currently doing two things—technically optimizing market structure and commercially connecting with mainstream institutions—that are paving the way for this future.