Buenos Aires has a distinct frequency. It is a city where European grandeur collides with Latin American intensity, a place where economic theory is not an abstract concept discussed in ivory towers, but a visceral, daily struggle for preservation. It is, therefore, no accident that this metropolis was chosen to host Devconnect 2025. The backdrop of Argentina, a country synonymous with both monetary volatility and grassroots crypto adoption, provided the perfect stage for an industry that is finally growing up.

If previous years in the crypto cycle were defined by noise, spectacle, and the blinding lights of speculative mania, reminiscent of a Las Vegas casino floor, Buenos Aires offered a stark, sobering contrast. The air didn’t smell of “easy money” and vaporware; it smelled of strong coffee and serious engineering. Here, the narrative shifted. We are no longer building toys for the bored and wealthy; we are building infrastructure for a world that is cracking at the seams.

To navigate this profound shift, we enlisted the insights of key industry architects: Arthur Firstov (Mercuryo CBO), who focused on the privacy mandate; Vivien Lin (BingX CPO), who detailed the integration of AI into trading ecosystems; and Ivan Machena (8lends CCO), who provided a vital assessment of the layer-2 adoption landscape.

Through extensive back-channel conversations with these leaders, a clear picture emerges. We are entering a new epoch. This is the story of how privacy became a mandate, how Artificial Intelligence is demanding a seat at the financial table, and how global diversity finally shattered the myth of the “archetypal user.”

The Privacy Mandate, From Feature to Foundation

The most potent message from Buenos Aires was not broadcast via fireworks or celebrity endorsements. It was whispered in the dense fabric of technical workshops and crowded hacker houses. The message is simple: transparency is a feature, but total exposure is a flaw.

In Bangkok, at previous gatherings, privacy was merely a “track”, a side room visited by cypherpunks and idealists. In Buenos Aires, it was the main event. The industry has collectively realized that without privacy, there is no mass adoption, only mass surveillance.

Arthur Firstov, the Chief Business Officer of Mercuryo, captured this paradigm shift perfectly. Reflecting on the dominant research areas of the event, Firstov noted a distinct change in temperature.

“Privacy was the defining theme,” Firstov asserts, before continuing:

“Compared to Bangkok, where privacy was just one important track, Buenos Aires elevated it to the main stage.”

His observation aligns with a sentiment that permeated every venue of the conference. A phrase began circulating around the co-working spaces and lecture halls, becoming the unofficial motto of Devconnect 2025:

“If your wallet is not privacy-preserving by design, it is legacy.”

This is not a technological fad, it is a response to an increasingly transparent world where financial data is weaponized. Firstov highlights that the tone was set from the top, with Vitalik Buterin offering a “full walkthrough of his personal privacy stack, from OS and mobile devices to private RPC.”

But the crucial evolution lies in how this technology is now being packaged. It is no longer about command-line interfaces for the elite; it is about invisibility.

Firstov explains:

“Builders focused on stealth addresses, smart AA [Account Abstraction] patterns, selective disclosures, and ‘creating better defaults so users do not even notice how much complexity is being handled beneath the surface.”

This “invisibility” is the holy grail. The user does not want to understand zero-knowledge proofs; they simply want to know their bank balance isn’t public property.

Alongside this push for privacy, Firstov identified a pragmatic evolution in DeFi: the rise of “preconfirmations for instant-feeling stablecoin payments” and new yield surfaces that offer “simple, ‘money-market style’ experiences without going full degen.” The industry is moving away from 10,000% APY Ponzi schemes toward boring, reliable, private finance.

The “Black Box” Controversy, Who Do We Trust?

However, no revolution is without its internal schisms. While the consensus on the need for privacy was absolute, the method of achieving it sparked the most heated technical debates of the week. The eye of the storm was the reliance on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), hardware-based secure enclaves.

Is the future of privacy found in cryptographic math or in silicon manufacturing?

Firstov describes this division as the “most unexpected or controversial technical debate” of the event. On one side stood the pragmatists. He notes:

“One camp argued that TEEs are ‘practically necessary for high-throughput, low-latency, and private computation’, particularly for private settlement, derivatives strategies, and agent-based execution.”

The argument is compelling: if we want Wall Street speeds on the blockchain, math alone might be too slow. We need hardware acceleration.

But the opposition was loud, principled, and deeply skeptical. Firstov relays their warning: “If the trust model becomes ‘trust this black-box server in a data center,’ then crypto is not improving much over traditional finance.”

If we simply replace a bank’s server with Intel’s SGX enclave, have we actually decentralized anything?

This led to an unresolved meta-question that will likely define research priorities for the rest of the decade:

“How much of the world’s stablecoin and payment rails are we comfortable running on opaque hardware… and what does ‘trust-minimized enough’ actually mean in that context?”

The Rise of the Machines: AI as the New Financial Architect

While cryptographers sparred over hardware trust, another titan was quietly integrating itself into the crypto stack: Artificial Intelligence. Devconnect 2025 wasn’t just about the ledger; it was about the inevitable marriage of the decentralized database and the autonomous brain.

Vivien Lin, Chief Product Officer and Head of BingX Labs, brought a perspective from the front lines of centralized exchanges (CEXs), which are rapidly morphing into something far more complex. For her, the primary theme was undeniable.

Lin says:

“The primary theme for me was the integration of AI into exchange infrastructure and the realization that exchanges are evolving into full financial ecosystems, not just trading applications.”

She paints a picture of a future where AI acts as the connective tissue of finance.

“Builders were focused on how AI can unify trading, custody, payments, risk management, and user intelligence into a single ‘super app’ experience.”

However, much like the TEE debate in the privacy sector, the integration of AI brings its own security paradox. How do you trust an AI with your life savings? Lin notes a strong push toward “secure, verifiable systems, including privacy-preserving compute and on-chain proofs, that ensure AI-driven features don’t compromise user data or fund safety.”

The goal is to create ecosystems that are “both intelligent and deeply secure, giving users more automation and context without sacrificing trust.” But the most fascinating friction point, according to Lin, wasn’t about capability, it was about autonomy.

“The major friction point was how much autonomy AI agents should have in trading environments,” Lin explains. The debate split the room.

She adds:

“Some developers argued that agents should manage liquidity, rebalance portfolios, or place orders without human oversight. Others warned that giving AI unrestricted access to execution layers could create systemic risk.”

The core disagreement touches on the very nature of human agency in markets: “Should AI be a co-pilot for traders or a fully autonomous participant in market structure?” In Buenos Aires, the consensus seemed to be shifting toward autonomy, provided the guardrails of cryptography are strong enough to hold it.

Geography is Destiny, Lessons from the Global South

Perhaps the most transformative aspect of Devconnect 2025 was the location itself. Hosting this event in Argentina forced the global developer community to touch grass. While Silicon Valley developers obsess over optimizing code for milliseconds, the people of Buenos Aires obsess over preserving the value of their labor against inflation.

Arthur Firstov observed how this radical diversity shifted the conversation from theoretical scaling to survival tools. “Devconnect brought radically different user priorities into the same room,” he says.

“Latin American teams highlighted everyday use cases such as ‘wallets on low-cost smartphones’ and rent or payroll paid in stablecoins,” Firstov notes, further adding:

“Contrast this with the Asian and US infrastructure teams, who remained focused on “perpetual futures, routing, MEV, and latency.”

This collision of worlds forced a synthesis. The conversation moved away from simple “Transactions Per Second” (TPS) bragging rights toward UX and practical deployment. Firstov lists the questions that actually matter now:

“How can smart wallets hide complexity so users feel like they are using a normal fintech app? How do we support both ‘high-frequency trading flows and monthly salary payments’ without compromising trust or security?”

The biggest realization? “There is no single archetypal user in crypto.”

Vivien Lin echoes this sentiment, noting how the Argentine presence grounded the high-flying technical debates.

“The diversity of developers, especially strong representation from Argentina, shifted the discussion toward real adoption challenges on the ground, not just theoretical scaling.”

Argentine builders didn’t want to talk about the philosophy of money; they wanted to solve immediate problems.

Lin explains:

“Argentine builders raised issues around inflation, capital controls, and the need for fast settlement rails that work reliably in volatile economies.”

This expanded the scope of what an exchange should be, pushing for “AI-powered ecosystems that address both local constraints and broader challenges such as compliance fragmentation, cross-border liquidity, and mobile-first onboarding.”

What is Actually Being Built? Infrastructure Over Hype

Stepping away from the philosophical and geographical, we must ask: where are the builders actually deploying code?

Ivan Machena, Chief Communication Officer at 8lends, provides a sober look at the landscape. The era of “ghost chains”, blockchains with high valuations but no users, is ending. The focus is now on ecosystems that support real products.

“Looking at the broader industry conversations happening around Devconnect,” Machena observes, “several layer-2 and application-layer projects continue to attract strong builder interest.”

On the consumer front, Machena highlights Base. It is frequently cited for its “rapid growth and smooth onboarding infrastructure,” effectively becoming the gateway for the retail user. In the DeFi segment, Arbitrum retains its crown as the “preferred choice thanks to its mature ecosystem and composability,” while Polygon remains a staple for teams seeking balance.

However, Machena notes a migration toward the technically superior.

Arthur Firstov adds another layer to this adoption map, pointing toward the privacy and “agent-native” sectors. He identifies Aztec as drawing “serious attention as a privacy-first environment where products can be ‘private by default, selectively transparent where necessary’.”

Crucially, Firstov highlights Privacy Pools as the bridge between the cypherpunk ethos and institutional reality. It emerged as a “compliance-aware solution… a ‘practical answer to what privacy looks like when regulators and serious capital must be comfortable with it’.”

Furthermore, the physical world is coming on-chain. Firstov notes a trend of teams building DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) style storage and compute services, paid for in stablecoins, “aiming to make crypto feel like traditional cloud APIs.”

Outlook 2026: From Casino to Cathedral

As the attendees of Devconnect 2025 disperse from Buenos Aires, returning to their respective corners of the globe, the mood is undeniably different. The industry is maturing. The cultural ethos of the event, small, technical, community-led sessions rather than massive marketing spectacles is shaping the narrative for the coming year.

Arthur Firstov predicts a fundamental pivot in how we tell the story of crypto:

“Expect 2026 narratives to reflect that shift,  ‘infrastructure story instead of casino story,’ ‘stablecoins as the front end of crypto,’ and privacy as table stakes.”

This is a vision of a world where crypto ceases to be a synonym for gambling and becomes the invisible, robust plumbing of the global financial system. The questions are no longer about token prices. As Firstov puts it, the growing question is: “Which Web2–Web3 integrations will actually ship and move the needle on real users?”

Vivien Lin agrees, seeing the future in interconnected ecosystems rather than walled gardens.

“It reinforced the view that the future of crypto trading will be ecosystem-first. This ethos pushes the industry toward interoperable, AI-powered trading ecosystems where liquidity, identity, execution, and strategy automation become increasingly unified as we move into 2026.”

Buenos Aires was a stress test for the soul of crypto. The industry passed, not by offering easy answers, but by finally asking the right, difficult questions. We leave with fewer illusions, but with better tools. The “Casino Story” is dead; the “Infrastructure Story” has begun. And for the first time in a long time, it feels like we are building something that will last.

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Victoria, Seychelles, Nov. 28, 2025 — Bitget, the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX) will donate $1.54 million USD ($12,000,000 HKD) to fully support families affected by the Wang Fuk Court fire in Tai Po, Hong Kong, and to assist community rebuilding efforts.

The contribution responds to one of Hong Kong’s deadliest residential fires in decades, after a five-alarm blaze swept through multiple towers at the Wang Fuk Court estate on November 26, claiming at least 128 lives, injuring more than 70 people and forcing over 900 residents into temporary shelters.

Due to the incident, authorities have initiated criminal and anti-corruption investigations into the renovation works and the safety of materials used at the site, while emergency teams continue search, rescue, and recovery operations and families work to locate missing relatives.

To ensure that relief reaches those in need in a structured and accountable way, Bitget has mandated three of Hong Kong’s most trusted charities to execute the $12,000,000 HKD ($1.54M USD approx.) donation.

Yan Chai Hospital will receive $5,000,000 HKD ($640,000 USD) to support emergency medical services, treatment for the injured, and rehabilitation for affected families.

The Salvation Army Hong Kong will receive $3,500,000 HKD ($450,000 USD approx.) to provide financial assistance, temporary accommodation, basic necessities, and livelihood support for households that have lost homes and income.

Po Leung Kuk will receive $3,500,000 HKD ($450,000 USD approx.) to deliver psychological counselling, community outreach, and long-term case follow-up for survivors, bereaved families, and vulnerable residents in the surrounding area.

The relief fund is structured so that every dollar is deployed in a transparent, timely, and targeted manner, complementing the Hong Kong government’s emergency measures, temporary housing arrangements, and ongoing inspections of residential estates undergoing repairs.

Through medical assistance, financial support, mental health services, and on-the-ground community work, partnered charities will help families navigate the immediate aftermath of the disaster and the longer road to recovery.

Bitget stands with Hong Kong at this difficult moment and extends condolences to all those who lost loved ones in the Wang Fuk Court fire, with the hope that affected residents can rebuild their homes and communities as safely and quickly as possible.

About Bitget

Established in 2018, Bitget is the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX), serving over 120 million users with access to millions of crypto tokens, tokenized stocks, ETFs, and other real-world assets, while offering real-time access to Bitcoin price, Ethereum price, XRP price, and other cryptocurrency prices, all on a single platform.

The ecosystem is committed to helping users trade smarter with its AI-powered trading tools, interoperability across tokens on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain, and wider access to real-world assets. On the decentralized side, Bitget Wallet is an everyday finance app built to make crypto simple, secure, and part of everyday finance.

Serving over 80 million users, it bridges blockchain rails with real-world finance, offering an all-in-one platform for on- and off-ramping, trading, earning, and paying seamlessly.

Bitget is driving crypto adoption through strategic partnerships, such as its role as the Official Crypto Partner of the World’s Top Football League, LALIGA, in EASTERN, SEA and LATAM markets. Aligned with its global impact strategy, Bitget has joined hands with UNICEF to support blockchain education for 1.1 million people by 2027. In the world of motorsports, Bitget is the exclusive cryptocurrency exchange partner of MotoGP™, one of the world’s most thrilling championships.

For more information, visit: Website | Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | Discord | Bitget Wallet

For media inquiries, please contact: [email protected]

Risk Warning: Digital asset prices are subject to fluctuation and may experience significant volatility. Investors are advised to only allocate funds they can afford to lose. The value of any investment may be impacted, and there is a possibility that financial objectives may not be met, nor the principal investment recovered. Independent financial advice should always be sought, and personal financial experience and standing carefully considered. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Bitget accepts no liability for any potential losses incurred. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice. For further information, please refer to our Terms of Use.

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Prediction markets, once niche experiments, have evolved into significant financial instruments. These platforms, where participants trade on the outcomes of future events, have attracted significant attention due to their demonstrated ability to be more accurate than traditional polls and commentators, particularly concerning critical political and economic results. Their rise is further fueled by the desire for individuals to leverage their knowledge for profit and a broader cultural obsession with real-time data and future outcomes, leading to hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars flowing through these markets weekly.

The industry’s success has validated a multi-billion dollar demand. The current environment is primarily shaped by a duopoly, Kalshi and Polymarket. These two platforms, while seemingly in direct competition, represent two different approaches to the same market. Kalshi is positioned as a regulated exchange, while Polymarket is the leading decentralized, crypto-native marketplace. A new contender, Rain, has recently emerged, built with a distinctly different, permissionless architecture aimed at addressing the structural limitations of the incumbents.

This comparison examines these three notable platforms, Kalshi, Polymarket, and Rain, focusing on four core areas: scalability and liquidity, outcome resolution and trust, user experience and accessibility, and the fundamental tension between decentralization and centralization.

The Central Constraint: Market Creation Liquidity

While the prediction market industry often focuses on metrics like trading volume and active users, the true barrier to massive growth is a structural bottleneck known as “Market-Creation Liquidity”. This refers to the speed, cost, and accessibility for any user to create a new, tradable market. The current dominant models Kalshi and Polymarket operate under a “publisher” model, acting as gatekeepers, which limits their ability to fully scale.

Kalshi: The Regulatory Bottleneck

Kalshi’s market position is defined by its compliance-first approach. As a centralized, US-based platform, it is fully regulated by the CFTC as a Designated Contract Market. This regulatory clarity grants it access to traditional financial institutions, institutional hedgers, and fiat-based retail users who prioritize certainty.

However, this regulatory framework imposes a “Regulatory Bottleneck”. The process for listing new market types is a protracted legal function, not merely an engineering one, because its model is fundamentally permissioned by regulators. A notable example is the CFTC’s initial denial of Kalshi’s proposal for election-based contracts, deeming them “gaming,” which led to an expensive lawsuit against its own regulator to eventually list the markets.

As a result, Kalshi is structurally limited to listing a small number of high-volume, mass-market events, the “head” of the demand curve. Its focus is restricted to markets lucrative enough to justify the immense legal and lobbying costs, such as major sports or economic data. The platform’s growth is demonstrably throttled by the pace of the court system, as it navigates ongoing legal battles over its sports contracts in various U.S. states. Its Market-Creation Liquidity is near-zero, as it is permissioned by law.

Polymarket: The Human Bottleneck

Polymarket, representing the decentralized ethos, is the world’s largest crypto-native prediction market. It is known for on-chain transparency, self-custody of funds, and generating massive volume on political, cultural, and crypto events.

Despite its decentralized branding and on-chain mechanics, Polymarket is architecturally a “permissioned service,” not a fully permissionless protocol. Its official documentation confirms that markets are created by its internal team with community input, revealing a “Human Bottleneck”. Its success hinges on its editorial judgment, operating more like a media company.

This model is inherently unscalable; scaling the number of markets requires a proportionate scaling of its curation staff. While impressive volume (38,270 new markets in a peak month) is generated by a centralized team, it is a statistical fraction of the potential of a truly user-generated, permissionless system. Polymarket’s Market-Creation Liquidity is considered low and curated, as it is permissioned by a team.

Rain: The Permissionless Platform Approach

Rain, built with scalability in mind via an automated market-maker (AMM) design and cross-chain primitives , is a newer protocol designed explicitly to solve the “Market-Creation Liquidity Crisis”. Its architecture represents a shift from a “publisher” to a true “platform” model.

Rain’s defining feature is the permissionless primitive: any user can create a market. This aims to capture the “Long Tail of Probability,” a concept where the aggregate value of millions of niche, low-demand products rivals the value of a few “hits”. While incumbents battle over the “head” (e.g., presidential elections, major sports), Rain targets the near-infinite universe of niche events that matter to specific communities or businesses, such as project deadlines, GitHub issues, or internal DAO votes. The platform’s value is intended to be derived from the aggregate trading volume of millions of niche markets that are impossible to create on incumbent platforms.

This architecture also introduces two distinct market types: Public Markets (visible to all) and Private Markets (requiring a code to enter). This Private Market capability is positioned as a new product category, transforming prediction markets into an active, corporate coordination tool. For example, a CEO could create a private, financially-backed incentive market for an engineering team’s product shipment deadline, a B2B market that Kalshi and Polymarket are unable to service.

Trust and Outcome Resolution

Outcome resolution, the mechanism for determining a real-world result, is the most critical trust variable for prediction markets.

Centralized Adjudication (Kalshi)

Kalshi relies on traditional, centralized adjudication, consistent with exchange rules and regulatory oversight. Its internal team, bound by CFTC rules, acts as the “centralized arbiter” or oracle. This approach offers clarity, speed, and legal recourse for users.

The primary risk, however, is a catastrophic “single point of failure”. Power over the final say rests with the operator and its regulatory counterparties. This is not merely a technical risk but an existential political one, as the platform’s authority is delegated by the CFTC and could be revoked by a new political administration or court ruling, potentially freezing capital. For institutional users, this trade-off is often acceptable, but for others, it raises fears of centralized entity abuse. Furthermore, this human-in-the-loop model reinforces the platform’s constraints and is unscalable for the “long tail” of markets.

Decentralized Oracles (Polymarket)

Polymarket leverages blockchain transparency, decentralized oracles, and dispute protocols to make outcomes auditable. Its core resolution mechanism relies on UMA’s Optimistic Oracle, a “trust-by-default” model where an answer is proposed and assumed true unless disputed. This system reduces opacity but requires robust oracle design and has been vulnerable to manipulation in low-liquidity scenarios.

A high-profile incident exposed a vulnerability where an attacker with a large holding of $UMA tokens successfully manipulated a governance vote to force a factually incorrect outcome. This incident revealed a conflict of interest where token-holders (voters) can also be market participants (bettors). In response, UMA’s transition to a new model involves abandoning permissionless resolution and creating a “whitelist of experienced proposers,” effectively re-centralizing the resolution mechanism. This move trades the governance attack vector for a new centralization and collusion risk.

The AI-Augmented Hybrid (Rain)

Rain’s model aims to marry transparency with speed by removing human gatekeepers. Its pitch for fair outcomes leverages AI for added transparency while maintaining decentralization. The system concentrates on automated, on-chain resolution augmented by algorithmic oracles, a consensus system of several AI models.

Rain’s multi-stage hybrid system is designed for both scalability and security.

• Initial Resolution. For Public Markets, the creator or the AI Oracle can be chosen as the initial resolver. The AI Oracle is designed for low-cost, impartial, data-driven results. For Private Markets, the creator resolves the outcome (e.g., the CEO resolving their internal company market).
• Dispute Mechanism. Following the initial resolution, a “Dispute Window” opens. Any participant can file a dispute by posting collateral, an economic stake that prevents abuse. An AI judge then investigates the dispute and can change the resolution. If the losing side escalates the dispute further, it is checked by “decentralized human oracles” for a final, binding decision.

This architecture provides a scalable, automated way to resolve the millions of public “long tail” markets via the AI oracle. The dispute system acts as an economically-incentivized backstop, similar to an optimistic system but with a robust, decentralized human backstop, rather than a token-vote that has been shown to be gameable.

Conclusion

The prediction market industry has been validated by the “Old Guard” of Kalshi and Polymarket, proving a multi-billion dollar demand while simultaneously exposing their structural ceilings. They function as services and publishers, constrained by legal and human gatekeepers, respectively. The 1000x growth opportunity in this sector will not be found in fighting over the same few “head” markets. Instead, it will be found in the permissionless innovation of the “Long Tail of Probability”. The real value lies not in forecasting the one presidential election, but in forecasting the ten million project deadlines, supply chain arrivals, and community votes that form the undiscovered “long tail” of our economy. Capturing this future requires a protocol built on three pillars: permissionless creation, scalable resolution via mechanisms like AI-augmented oracles, and long-tail-native features such as private markets. The evolution of this space marks a transition beyond being just another trading venue, it is the platformization of prediction itself.

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