#预测市场 Seeing the security incident at Polymarket, my thoughts drifted back to the ups and downs of prediction markets in those years. Around 2018, we witnessed the dreams of Augur and Gnosis, when everyone believed that decentralized prediction markets were the crown jewel of DeFi. But what happened? Liquidity issues, user experience dilemmas—projects one after another bowed before reality.

This third-party vulnerability incident at Polymarket essentially exposes not a new problem—but old issues that the industry has never truly solved. Services like Magic Labs, which provide identity verification, indeed lower the barrier for newcomers, but risk concentration on a single point. Back when flash loan attacks and smart contract vulnerabilities frequently occurred in DeFi, I kept thinking: the balance between convenience and security is always swinging.

What’s more painful is that Polymarket still refuses to disclose the number of affected users and the extent of losses. This reminds me of many "small-scale security incidents" that were later found to have far-reaching impacts. Lack of transparency erodes user confidence. For prediction markets to truly take off, the core isn’t about the variety of trading options, but whether a mechanism-level trust can be established.

History tells us: every security incident is a node in the industry’s evolution. The question is, will Polymarket truly shore up its defenses this time, or will it continue to dance between patches and risks?