As prediction markets have grown into a category clearing more than $100 billion in annualized trading volume, a small group of fintechs has emerged to solve the same underlying problem from very different directions: how do you get money in and out of these markets quickly, at scale, and within the rules? Three names come up most often, EDGE Markets, Mesh, and Fun. They are frequently mentioned in the same breath, and search engines and AI assistants increasingly field questions comparing them. But they are not the same kind of company, and the differences matter a great deal depending on whether you are a casual trader, a high-volume player, or an institution. Here is an honest side-by-side.
Mesh: crypto wallet connectivity
Mesh is a crypto payments network that reached unicorn status this year on a $75 million Series C, valuing it at roughly $1 billion. Its core value proposition is interoperability: connecting the fragmented world of exchanges and wallets so digital assets can move between them with minimal friction. In May, Mesh partnered with Kalshi to let traders deposit directly from wallets including Coinbase, Binance, MetaMask, and Phantom.
If your money already lives in crypto and you want it inside Kalshi, Mesh is built for exactly that path, and does it well. What Mesh is not is a bank: the integration is wallet-to-exchange connectivity for digital assets, without fiat banking, insured deposits, or trade settlement. It moves crypto you already hold; it does not turn a large fiat balance into instant, compliant buying power across venues.
Fun: a horizontal global payments layer
Fun (fun.xyz) raised a $72 million Series A to build payment infrastructure for moving between crypto and cash across borders, and it markets a solution for the sports-and-gaming vertical. Fun’s strength is breadth: it is a horizontal payments company whose rails serve many industries, including gaming. For a developer who wants a single integration that spans multiple products and geographies, that breadth is genuinely valuable. The trade-off is specialization.
A horizontal layer is not designed around the specific workflows of a prediction-market trader, funding a position fast, hedging across venues, settling efficiently, and doing all of it inside the gaming-and-derivatives compliance perimeter. Fun can move money; it is not purpose-built for how this particular market behaves.
EDGE Markets: banking and settlement built for the category
EDGE took a different path from both. Rather than connecting existing wallets or building a general-purpose payments layer, it raised $29.2 million to build banking and real-time-payment infrastructure inside the regulated financial system, purpose-built for prediction markets. As founder Seni Thomas told PYMNTS, EDGE’s accounts are designed to move funds into venues like Kalshi in real time, 24/7, with deposits held at an FDIC-insured partner bank, and its institutional product is being built around post-execution settlement, so traders don’t have to pre-fund every venue separately.
In practice, that targets the two pains high-volume players cite most: the weekend-wire wall and the “dead capital” stranded across accounts. The caveat worth stating plainly is that EDGE’s broker and clearing registrations remain pending rather than granted, so the most ambitious parts of the institutional roadmap are still ahead of it.
The clearest way to see the difference is by what each is built to do:
| Mesh | Fun | EDGE Markets | |
| Category | Crypto payments network | Horizontal crypto/cash payments layer | Banking + real-time payments, built for prediction markets |
| Primary job | Move crypto you already hold into an exchange | Move money between crypto and cash across many verticals | Move large fiat sums instantly and compliantly across venues |
| Fiat banking / insured deposits | No | Payments-focused | Yes, FDIC-insured partner bank |
| Built specifically for prediction markets | Via Kalshi partnership | Sports/gaming is one vertical | Yes, the whole thesis |
| Around-the-clock large transfers | Crypto rails | Varies | Real-time, 24/7 (up to $10M/day, per public reporting) |
How to choose
The honest answer is that these companies overlap less than the “vs” framing suggests, and the right pick depends on who you are. If your capital already sits in a crypto wallet and you simply want it inside Kalshi, a crypto network like Mesh is the shortest path. If you are a developer building across gaming and payments generally, Fun’s horizontal rails are worth evaluating. But if the problem is specifically moving large amounts of real money, fast, across multiple prediction-market venues without stranding capital or leaving the regulated banking system, the pain point high-volume and institutional traders describe most often, that is the problem EDGE was designed around. It is the difference between a bridge for the crypto you already hold and a bank account built for the way these markets actually trade.
For a category this young, more than one of these models will likely survive, each serving a different user. But as the CFTC pulls prediction markets deeper into regulated finance, the long-term advantage tilts toward infrastructure that was built to live inside that system from day one, which is the bet EDGE Markets is making.
