How Yield Works on Open Positions

Why Idle Capital Is a Problem

Ordinarily, when you open a position on a prediction market, your funds sit locked until the market resolves or you sell your shares. During that stretch, they're not earning interest elsewhere or being put to work anywhere else. We call that opportunity cost.

That's a minor annoyance for a market resolving in a couple of days, but a much bigger one for markets that span months or years.

Suppose you buy $10,000 worth of YES shares in January, priced at 80¢ each, on whether Candidate McCandidateFace wins re-election in December.

That's nearly a year of waiting. If McCandidateFace wins, you make a 25% return ($2,500), which is solid, but your capital did nothing else that entire year. This is the gap Predict's yield feature closes.

How It Works

Markets with a Yield badge on the Markets page are yield-bearing: their open positions currently generate yield for the traders holding them.

This works by routing the USDT collateral behind those positions to Venus Protocol, a decentralized money market on BNB Chain, where it earns interest around the clock, even while it's backing your open position.

Note that not every market is yield-bearing. Predict's backend monitors the utilization rate of Venus's USDT pool and only allows new yield-bearing markets while there's enough headroom, pausing deployment of new ones once utilization gets too high. So, be sure to check for the badge prior to opening a position.

How the Rate Is Set and Attributed

There's no fixed yield rate on Predict. What accrues tracks the utilization rate of the USDT pool on Venus at any given moment, so it moves with market conditions rather than a schedule Predict sets.

Predict takes a 10% management fee on the yield your position generates, taken from the yield earned (never from your principal).

Yield is attributed to your account based on regular on-chain snapshots of your open positions, so what you earn reflects how much you held and for how long, not a flat amount handed out at the end.

Claiming Your Yield

Yield accrues automatically, but claiming it is a separate step. Head to the Portfolio page, where any yield available to claim shows up alongside your open positions.

Distribution runs weekly, so freshly accrued yield needs a little time before it shows up as claimable.

Stacking Yield With Bond Markets

Yield accrues on the collateral behind a position regardless of which market it's backing, which means it stacks on top of whatever that market pays out on its own.

Take a bond market: a near-certain-outcome market where NO shares trade at $0.98–$0.99 for a small, dependable return. On Predict, that 1–2% isn't the entire story. Whatever yield accrued on your collateral while the position was open comes on top of it.

What to Watch For

Predict actively monitors Venus's utilization and available liquidity, but a sudden liquidity crunch on the USDT pool is still possible.

A few things worth knowing:

• Liquidity crunches happen at high utilization. If the utilization rate crosses a set threshold, there's little floating liquidity left to unwind positions on short notice.
• Claiming can pause briefly. Users with open positions on yield-bearing markets may be temporarily unable to claim winnings during a crunch. Based on historical data, these situations resolve within about a day.
• Predict has safeguards in place. If needed, Predict can withdraw funds from Venus and convert yield-bearing markets to non-yield-bearing ones until a crunch resolves, and pause new yield-bearing market deployment in the meantime.

None of this changes what a market itself resolves to. It only affects the yield layered on top, and how quickly you can claim it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yield Glossary