Hedgehog Markets has raised $3.5 million in a funding round that included the Solana Foundation and Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. (Bankman-Fried is a 29-year-old billionaire who founded the FTX crypto exchange.)
The Hedgehog Markets site, which is in a testing phase with more than 6,000 registered users, will be the first prediction market platform to go live on Solana’s blockchain.
Decentralized prediction markets like Augur, Gnosis and Polymarket have gained some traction, but the team behind Hedgehog believes there’s still plenty of market share to capture, especially on Solana. These products allow users to open a betting market on blockchain-based platform.
According to George Yu, the founder of Hedgehog, the company’s decision to launch on Solana was based on the blockchain’s fast transaction speeds and low gas fees, which Yu believes is integral to Hedgehog’s goal of being the most user-friendly prediction platform for newcomers to the crypto sector.
Yu told CoinDesk that Hedgehog’s most popular markets in beta testing have been sports, politics, crypto and COVID-19.
Yu said the money raised in the seed round will be used to hire additional engineers, expand the platform’s product features and increase its user base.