Seeker LabsResearch

Research on the trends and theses we're betting on.

Seeker Labs is a research practice for the frontier — rigorous, opinionated work on prediction markets, physical-world AI, and the market mechanisms quietly remaking how the world works. We go deep on what we think is coming next, back it with the math and the evidence, and argue it as clearly as we can.

Read the research
Sort
View

Prediction Markets

Field notes + the series

Field notes on where the category stands and the open problems still to solve — plus a ground-up series on how it all works. Read the series top to bottom; each piece builds on the one before.

The Reversal
How an asset class is made
In 2023 the CFTC tried to ban prediction markets as gaming. By 2026 it calls them a financial asset class, seats their founders on a committee, and sues states to keep them federal. The anatomy of a regulatory reversal.
Jun 12, 2026 · 15 min
The Listing Engine
The one-day rule
A licensed U.S. exchange lists an event contract in about one business day by certifying its own compliance — no pre-approval. The engine behind Kalshi, the line offshore Polymarket can't cross, and what Vietnam would have to build.
Jun 11, 2026 · 16 min
The Pathway
The commodity door
The U.S. settled prediction markets as a derivative; most of the world hasn't. In Vietnam, three of four regulatory doors are shut — securities by monopoly, gambling by design, crypto by definition. The fourth, the commodity-exchange door, is open.
Jun 10, 2026 · 27 min
Open Problems
The quiet dollarization
To connect a thousand fragmented markets you need one shared unit to settle in. The answer everyone's converging on is a dollar stablecoin — legible and global, but dollarization by another name. The trade-offs, and Vietnam's pilot.
Jun 7, 2026 · 11 min
Open Problems
The bottleneck isn't liquidity
Everyone races to fix liquidity; the real ceiling is resolution — who decides the truth that pays out. A $242M market that couldn't settle its own yes/no question, and the tiered, AI-assisted truth layer it takes to settle a million.
Jun 4, 2026 · 12 min
The Hedge
What the gambling built
A sports insurer just hedged two teams' bonus payouts on Kalshi — at about half what a reinsurer would quote. The liquidity that made it possible was paid for by sports bettors: the clearest proof yet that the entertainment was the subsidy, not the point.
Jun 8, 2026 · 9 min
Integrity
The market knew
A soldier who knew Maduro was about to fall, a Google engineer with the search data, an editor who'd seen MrBeast's next video — prediction markets just had their insider-trading reckoning. The catch: insider trading is also the mechanism. The line between an edge and a crime, and who's built to police it.
May 31, 2026 · 11 min
Open Problems
One probability, a thousand markets
The price is global; the market isn't. Why prediction-market liquidity is trapped by jurisdiction, why 62¢ stops meaning 62% the moment you leave the dollar, and what it takes to connect a thousand pools.
Jun 3, 2026 · 18 min
The series · read in order
Start Here
What is a prediction market?
You've seen the percentages on the news. Here's what they actually are — a contract whose price is a live probability — in plain terms. The foundation for the series.
Jan 6, 2026 · 16 min
Explainer
Prediction markets, explained
A price is a probability. How the mechanism actually works — the math, the money, and why every serious market is about to have one.
Jan 13, 2026 · 8 min
The Case
Why prediction markets matter
A prediction market turns money into the most honest forecast we know how to make. Why it beats the experts, and why every serious market is about to have one.
Jan 20, 2026 · 14 min
Reading the Price
A price is a probability
A market price is a testable claim, not a slogan. How to grade a forecast — calibration and the Brier score — and why markets pass better than the experts do.
Jan 27, 2026 · 14 min
The Casino Question
It's not gambling
It looks like betting, and plenty of people trade it like betting. What separates a prediction market from a casino comes down to who sets the odds.
Feb 3, 2026 · 11 min
Mechanism Design
The market-maker problem
A new market has nothing to trade against. The fix — an algorithm that always quotes a price — is the hardest part of the machine. LMSR, CPMM, and why liquidity is the real product.
Feb 10, 2026 · 18 min
Resolution
Who decides what's true?
A market that pays out on real events is only as trustworthy as whoever rules on the outcome. Centralized resolvers, optimistic oracles, and the disputes in between.
Feb 17, 2026 · 18 min
Trust the Tape
Can you trust the price?
If anyone with money can move a market, why believe the number? Because pushing a price off the truth is a standing offer to everyone else to take your money.
Feb 24, 2026 · 9 min
The Asset Class
Event contracts are derivatives
Strip away the politics and the sports and an event contract is a plain financial instrument — a binary option on a real-world fact. The anatomy: payoff, collateral, settlement.
Mar 3, 2026 · 24 min
Hedging
Hedging the uninsurable
Insurance only exists for risks an actuary can price. A prediction market can hedge the ones they can't — an election, a ruling, a launch slipping.
Mar 10, 2026 · 7 min
Regulation
The CFTC and the birth of an asset class
For years event trading lived in a legal grey zone — offshore, unregulated, or shut down. In 2020 a U.S. regulator drew the line that turned it into a licensed market.
Mar 17, 2026 · 13 min
The Point
Information vs entertainment
Most of the volume is sports and most of the headlines say gambling. So why insist the point is information? Because only one of these is worth building infrastructure for.
Mar 24, 2026 · 7 min
The Playbook
The crypto-exchange playbook, again
A new asset class appears, the US regulates it first, and the first licensed exchange in each market runs away with the liquidity. Prediction markets are running the same script.
Apr 7, 2026 · 23 min
Network Effects
Winner-takes-most
Liquidity is a network effect — traders go where the action is, which brings more action. A natural experiment in Korea shows how lopsided the end state gets.
Apr 14, 2026 · 12 min
The Business
Inside Kalshi's ramp
From a standing start to a $22B valuation, Kalshi has posted one of the steepest revenue curves in exchange history. The numbers — and what they say about the category.
Apr 21, 2026 · 7 min
The Map
The global license map
If exchanges are winner-take-most and licenses are won one country at a time, the whole game is a race across a map. What it looks like, region by region.
Apr 28, 2026 · 12 min
The Limits
What prediction markets can't do
The honest other side of the case: where these markets get thin, slow, or self-defeating — and why some questions resist a price entirely.
May 5, 2026 · 7 min
Oracles
The truth layer
A market that settles on the real world needs a bridge from reality to the chain. That bridge — the oracle — is one of the most important and most attacked pieces of infrastructure in crypto.
May 12, 2026 · 7 min
The Evidence
Markets vs the experts
That a crowd with money beats credentialed forecasters isn't a vibe — it's one of the better-documented findings in social science. The evidence, and its limits.
May 19, 2026 · 12 min
The Frontier
When AI trades the future
What happens when the traders setting the price aren't people? AI agents may become both the training ground and the scoreboard for machine forecasting.
May 26, 2026 · 7 min
The Adjacent Unlock
Perps come onshore
On May 29, the regulator that legitimized event contracts opened the door to regulated crypto perpetuals — the clearest sign yet that the licensed-venue playbook is bigger than prediction markets.
May 30, 2026 · 7 min
Governance
Futarchy
Robin Hanson's heretical proposal: stop voting on policies and start betting on them. Vote on what we want; let markets decide how to get it.
Jun 1, 2026 · 7 min
The Economics
The cost of a market
A market that always quotes a price is doing something expensive — someone is paying to keep it liquid. Who, and how much, decides which markets get to exist.
Jun 5, 2026 · 7 min
The Vision
The probability layer of the internet
We started with a contract that pays $1 if it rains. Twenty-three pieces later, here's where it all goes — a world where the odds of anything are a number you can read, trade, and build on.
Jun 9, 2026 · 14 min

AI

A thesis

Notes on where AI goes next — starting from one bet: the binding constraint on physical-world AI isn't compute, it's data that doesn't exist yet.

Geopolitics

A thesis

How global realignment — tariffs, capital flows, and macro shocks — reshapes Asia and Vietnam, and how to actually trade it instead of just watching it.

Media

A thesis

Where prediction markets and the news collide — a future in which every story ships with a live market under the headline, from CNN and CNBC to Vietnam's own newsrooms.

Attention Economy

A thesis

Attention became the scarce asset — and a new primitive, pay-per-view "Content Rewards," turned the audience into a performance-priced sales force. The clipping economy: who's buying it, why it undercuts the ad giants, and where it's headed next.

Content Rewards
The clipping economy
For a century, platforms harvested your attention and sold it to advertisers. A new primitive flips it: brands post a bounty on attention and pay an army of clippers only for the views they deliver. A field guide to how attention got a price — and where it goes next.
Jun 2, 2026 · 10 min
Looksmaxxing
Peptides sold here
A class of mostly-unapproved research chemicals just had a viral mainstream summer — injected off TikTok protocols, sold in bodegas, branded by VCs. The whole thing balances on three words printed on every vial, and an FDA vote in July that decides whether any of it stays legal.
Jun 16, 2026 · 13 min
The Mechanics
Inside the clip army
A clip army looks like chaos. It's a precise machine — a brief, a marketplace, a verification layer, and a payout formula. How it really works, what it costs, and why it out-converts a polished ad.
May 26, 2026 · 10 min
Performance Marketing
Cheaper than Meta
Clipping looks like a tenth the price of a Meta ad, and budgets are already moving. But a view and an impression aren't the same unit — the honest accounting of pay-per-view, against the ad giants and against TikTok Shop.
May 12, 2026 · 9 min
The Grey Market
The first money in
Every new way to reach an audience gets discovered first by the businesses the polite channels won't take. Clipping's early money came from crypto casinos and prediction markets — follow it to see where the channel came from, and where the regulation will bite.
Jun 10, 2026 · 9 min
Case Study
Pay-per-patient
Two people and AI built a $1.8-billion telehealth company — and the internet decided AI was the story. It wasn't. The engine was an affiliate army paid per acquired patient, and the same machine that printed the revenue is the bomb wired underneath it.
Apr 10, 2026 · 11 min
Emerging Markets
The next billion clippers
The per-view payout that powers the clipping economy exists in maybe ten rich countries — none of them where the feeds are busiest. The biggest unclaimed prize in attention is a local pay-per-view layer for the markets the creator funds forgot.
Mar 17, 2026 · 9 min

The House

A thesis · read in order

The house always wins — and these days the house is an app on your phone. The line between investing, betting, and entertainment is dissolving, and online gambling is quietly one of the best businesses in software. A three-part read on the casino as the business model of the age: the convergence, the economics, and where the money pools.

Memecoins

A thesis · read in order

A meme coin is a meme with a price — the purest chip in a world that will speculate on anything. Three pieces on how a 2013 joke became a $150B asset class, why a joke has a price at all, and the machine that industrialized it into a fortune.

How we think

The practice

The most interesting questions live at the intersections — where a new market meets a new technology meets a shift in how people behave.

We pick the ones we can't put down, go deep, and form a view — with the math, the mechanism, and an honest account of what's hard. We'd rather be early and clear than safe and vague.

None of it is advice, and none of it is a newsletter business. It's the writing we wish existed — so we write it, whether or not anyone's looking.

Who's behind it

A two-person practice

We've built regulated financial products and exchange-grade infrastructure before — now we go deep on where it's all going.

VH
Viet Ho
Managing Partner

Builder and operator in regulated finance — now working where markets, AI, and new mechanisms meet. Co-founder of Liobank, a leading digital bank in Vietnam with more than a million users. A computer scientist by training and relentless on product, he writes to think in public — and to pressure-test what he actually believes.

JN
John Nguyen
Founding Partner

The technical core. Engineer at LayerZero; before that Bybit and Mantle — exchange-grade financial infrastructure, built alongside alumni of Robinhood, Stripe, and Tether. He lives in the math and the mechanism design everyone else hand-waves past, and makes every claim here earn its place.