Polymarket has made headlines this week, with multiple developments surrounding the prediction platform. It is gaining legitimacy with ICE exploring a $9 billion deal and Wall Street taking notice.

Against these backdrops, the network’s effect plays out across multiple chains and protocols that power its decentralized prediction markets.

Altcoin Stacks Powering Polymarket’s Breakout Moment

BeInCrypto recently reported that Polymarket could host the biggest airdrop in the industry. This, coupled with headlines about a prospective ICE investment, positions select altcoins to benefit from the platform’s growing valuation.

1. UMA: The Silent Backbone of Prediction Markets

UMA is important to Polymarket, but no one is paying attention. While all eyes are on Polymarket’s explosive growth, UMA remains the quiet infrastructure layer that makes decentralized predictions possible.

Polymarket uses UMA’s Optimistic Oracle (OO) to verify market outcomes transparently. This decentralized data verification mechanism allows proposers and disputers to determine the truth on-chain, without relying on any central authority.

“Polymarket supports UMA as a resolution source for markets displayed on the Polymarket.com interface. Polymarket, at its core, is oracle agonistic, but the UMA integration provides another option for market creators,” the platform shared in a recent blog.

Under the hood, UMA’s oracle ensures that every prediction, whether on elections, markets, or sports, can be settled securely and trustlessly.

The UMA-CTF adapter deployed on Polygon connects Polymarket’s conditional token framework (CTF) to UMA’s oracle, making every market resolution verifiable.

Despite this essential role, investors largely overlook UMA, focusing on Polymarket’s front-end success. If sentiment shifts toward recognizing the oracle’s importance, UMA could see significant upside as demand for on-chain data verification grows.

UMA Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto

2. Polygon (MATIC): The Chain Powering Polymarket’s Scalability

Polymarket runs entirely on Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake network, benefiting from its low-cost, high-speed infrastructure. The platform’s recent Polygon integration with X (Twitter) exposed over 600 million users to on-chain prediction markets, and by extension, to the Polygon ecosystem itself.

Polygon’s upcoming upgrades (PIPs 60 and 43) promise to boost throughput to 1,000 TPS and reduce finality to around 5 seconds, directly improving user experience for prediction markets.

According to Polygon Labs, these upgrades will enhance transaction capacity for apps like Polymarket, RWAs, and payments, solidifying Polygon as the go-to chain for consumer-scale crypto use cases.

“Polymarket’s success is a win for Polygon, Ethereum, and the entire crypto ecosystem,” said Josh Stark, who works with the Ethereum Foundation.

3. Ethereum (ETH): The Settlement Layer Behind It All

Indeed, Ethereum is critical to Polymarket’s story, serving as the foundational layer that made its existence possible.

“Polymarket [was] not possible without Ethereum USDC native with EVM wallets since 2020,” said Nick Tomaino.

Polymarket’s reliance on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ensures access to the industry’s deepest pool of developer talent, tooling, and security infrastructure.

The integration of USDC on Ethereum also facilitates seamless settlement for prediction markets.

As Ethereum’s Layer-2 ecosystem expands, including rollups like Katana, apps like Polymarket gain even more scalability options.

Stark predicts that this symbiotic relationship between Ethereum and its L2s will soon make building on EVM “the obvious choice” for future breakout applications.

Polymarket’s valuation surge is not just a win for its investors, including CEO Shayne Coplan; it validates the entire Ethereum-Polygon-UMA stack.

While the spotlight shines on the front-end platform, the deeper value may lie in the protocols powering its trustless logic and scalability.

As prediction markets go mainstream, these three altcoins could quietly become the biggest beneficiaries of Polymarket’s rise.