Impact markets: pricing what an event does to oil, BTC and stocks

What’s Brent worth if the US ends the Iranian blockade by year end?

Traders on @ifmarkets priced it at $104.90. And $106.61 if it doesn’t.

That $1.71 gap is the price of the event itself. You can bet on the event, you can long oil, but you can’t trade the gap with real money anywhere yet. Four teams are racing to change that.

Why does it matter?

Events are where the money gets made. Over 60% of the US equity risk premium was earned on scheduled macro announcement days, which make up only ~13% of the sample (Savor & Wilson).

Prediction markets price the odds of those events. What the event does to the asset has no liquid market of its own, so traders back it out of options skew and sell-side notes.

The demand to trade combinations is already obvious tho. Combos were 58% of Kalshi's volume in September, and parlays are the crudest way to stack conditions.

Luckily, the clean version is being built rn: impact markets, a.k.a. conditional markets. You price an asset in the world where an event happens, and only in that world.

How does it work?

Take the Iran blockade. The event splits the market into two worlds, and each world gets its own oil price.

So you only carry oil risk in the world your view is about.

The two prices also pin today's oil price. If the blockade is a coin flip, oil should sit near the midpoint, ~$105.76. If it drifts away, traders arb it back.

Those Brent numbers come from If Market's play-money test version on the 16th of October btw, so read them as a demo of how it works.

And it's obviously not all without risk. Being right about the event doesn't make you safe. You short oil in the "ends" world, the blockade does end, but if oil spikes first you can still get liquidated before you get paid.

Why now?

The idea is old. Hanson wrote about decision markets in 1999, Gnosis' conditional tokens date back to 2018 (Polymarket still settles on them), and Paradigm laid out "multiverse finance" in May 2025.

What's new is that prediction markets got deep enough to anchor the odds leg, and four teams are racing to ship the asset leg:

Decision markets are the cousin that's already live: MetaDAO and Umia steer $50.5M across 24 DAO treasuries.

What's the hard part?

Liquidity. An odds market needs one book per event. Proof's design needs five per event and asset: the perp, YES and NO conditional perps, YES and NO binaries. 20 events on 6 assets is 240 conditional books.

Each of those needs makers quoting both worlds, arbitrage against the perp and the odds market, and short resolution windows so capital isn't parked for months.

Then regulation. Cash-settled exposure to oil, stocks and BTC contingent on political events is a derivative almost everywhere. Kalshi and Polymarket already have the licences and the flow.

And Hyperliquid. HIP-4 outcome markets and HIP-3 perps already live on the same HyperCore stack. Someone pairing them could ship conditional books where the liquidity already sits. Just my inference tho, nobody has announced it.

My conclusion?

The primitive is real, and the demand is already visible in how fast combos took over the incumbents.

I'm not picking a winner yet tho. Every venue is pre-real-money and every traction number is paper.

What I'm watching:

There are no tokens to buy yet, but still: NFA in any way, shape or form.

The concept is very interesting tho imo.

Prediction markets taught the world to price events.

Impact markets will price what those events are worth.