A user finds your prediction market, connects their wallet, and picks a position they want to trade. Then they try to fund the account, and that's where a meaningful share of them disappear.
This is the deposit problem, and it's one of the biggest, least-discussed sources of lost revenue in prediction markets today.
What actually happens at the deposit step
Here's the flow that plays out on platforms without in-app deposit infrastructure: a user holds USDC on the Ethereum mainnet. The platform runs on Polygon, Base, or another chain. To fund their account, the user has to leave the platform, go through a series of extra steps to move funds across chains, approve a transaction, pay gas on the source chain, wait for confirmations, pay gas again on the destination chain, and wait again before the funds show up where they need to be.
Every one of those steps is a place a user can stop. Some don't understand what's happening when they're asked to move funds across chains. Some don't want to pay gas twice for a deposit they haven't even committed to. Some simply lose the thread between "I wanted to place a trade" and "I'm five steps into a token bridge." And for the users who do push through, a lot of these flows still rely on manually copying and pasting a deposit address between apps, which introduces its own failure mode: paste the wrong address, or a correct address on the wrong chain, and the deposit doesn't just fail to arrive, it can be gone for good. Whatever the reason, they give up before the deposit completes, or they complete it and the funds never show up, and the platform never sees them again.
Why this is a product problem, not a marketing problem
It's tempting to treat deposit drop-off as a top-of-funnel issue: get more traffic, and the numbers work out. But the users abandoning at the bridge step aren't unqualified leads. They're users who already found the platform, connected a wallet, and decided they wanted to trade. That's about as high-intent as a user gets before converting. Losing them at the deposit step is losing the most valuable part of the funnel.
The fix isn't more marketing spend. It's removing those extra steps from the user's path entirely.
Why cross-chain friction is worse for prediction markets than for other crypto apps
Cross-chain friction affects every multi-chain crypto product, but it hits prediction markets particularly hard because of timing. A DeFi user depositing into a yield product is usually making a considered, longer-horizon decision, so a five-minute bridge delay is an annoyance, not a dealbreaker. A prediction market user, by contrast, is often reacting to something happening right now: breaking news, a live event, a market that's about to close. If funding the account takes five confirmation steps and ten minutes, the moment the user wanted to act on may have already passed by the time the deposit clears. That's a second, separate reason to lose the user, on top of the raw abandonment risk of a multi-step deposit flow.
What an in-app deposit flow looks like
WalletConnect Deposit keeps the entire deposit experience inside the platform. A user picks an amount and a source, whether that's an exchange wallet or a self-custodial holding on a different chain. Routing, settlement, and confirmation all happen without the user ever seeing an extra screen or leaving the product.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's the same payment layer Ingenico, Stripe, PayPal, and Mangopay run on, applied to the specific deposit problem prediction markets face: users holding assets on one chain trying to fund an account on another.
The compounding cost of doing nothing
Every day a platform runs without an in-app deposit flow, it's losing a percentage of its highest-intent users at the exact moment they were ready to convert. That percentage doesn't show up cleanly in most analytics dashboards because a user who abandons mid-bridge often doesn't generate a clean, attributable drop-off event. It just looks like traffic that didn't convert, with no obvious explanation.
For a platform processing meaningful volume, even a small improvement in deposit completion rate translates directly into funded accounts and trading volume that would otherwise never have materialized. The deposit step isn't a minor UX detail. It's the difference between a user who trades on your platform and a user who quietly leaves, and unlike most conversion problems, it's one that's fully within a platform's control to fix.