Seeker LabsResearch

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

Seeker Labs is the research desk at Seeker — Viet Ho (Managing Partner) and John Nguyen (Research Partner), tracking prediction markets, AI, and the business models and technologies we think are about to matter.

Prediction Markets

A series · read in order

What prediction markets are, how the mechanism works, and why they're becoming a real asset class. Start at Part 1 — each piece assumes the one before it.

Start HerePart 1 · Newcomers
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 · 7 min
ExplainerPart 2 · Newcomers
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 CasePart 3 · Everyone
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 PricePart 4 · Newcomers
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 · 6 min
The Casino QuestionPart 5 · Newcomers
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 · 7 min
Mechanism DesignPart 6 · For the curious
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 · 12 min
ResolutionPart 7 · Newcomers
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 · 7 min
Trust the TapePart 8 · Newcomers
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 · 7 min
The Asset ClassPart 9 · For the curious
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 · 12 min
HedgingPart 10 · Everyone
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
RegulationPart 11 · Everyone
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 · 7 min
The PointPart 12 · Everyone
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 PlaybookPart 13 · Everyone
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 · 12 min
Network EffectsPart 14 · Everyone
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 · 7 min
The BusinessPart 15 · Everyone
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 MapPart 16 · Everyone
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 LimitsPart 17 · Everyone
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
OraclesPart 18 · Everyone
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 EvidencePart 19 · Everyone
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 FrontierPart 20 · Everyone
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 UnlockPart 21 · Everyone
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.
Jun 2, 2026 · 7 min
GovernancePart 22 · Everyone
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 9, 2026 · 7 min
The EconomicsPart 23 · For the curious
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 16, 2026 · 7 min
The VisionPart 24 · Capstone
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 23, 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.

ThesisBuilders · Investors
AI data for the physical world
The next AI frontier isn't bigger models — it's data for the physical world, which has no internet-scale corpus and has to be captured by hand. And unlike the internet, that data has a geography.
June 2026 · 10 min
The Data WallBuilders · Generalists
There is no internet for robots
The web handed models a pre-recorded copy of human thought. For the body, that recording was never made — and you can't scrape what was never written down.
June 2026 · 10 min
The Cost of DataBuilders · Investors
What a robot's training data actually costs
Teleoperation is the gold standard, and it costs 10–100 operator-hours per task. The unit economics of data you can't crawl — and why scaling 10× costs millions, not thousands.
June 2026 · 11 min
Cross-EmbodimentBuilders · Generalists
One brain, many bodies
If every robot learned alone, physical AI would never escape the data wall. Cross-embodiment learning lets one model absorb data from 22 robot types — pooling its way out.
July 2026 · 10 min
Synthetic DataBuilders · Investors
Manufacturing reality
If you can't capture enough real data, you manufacture it. World models generate physical interaction — joint angles, contacts, trajectories — and try to close the sim-to-real gap.
July 2026 · 11 min
The MoatInvestors · Builders
Who owns physical data?
Physical data can only be captured where the physical work happens — and that map looks nothing like the internet's. Who owns the data layer of physical AI, and why the moat has a geography.
July 2026 · 11 min