Pear Launches Open Beta on Solana, Bringing a Social Layer to Prediction Markets

Pear opened its public beta on July 15, available at beta.pear.trade, positioning itself as a social layer above prediction markets rather than another market to trade on.

"Pear isn't a prediction market. It is social trading," the team wrote in the launch announcement. The framing is deliberate: where most platforms ask users to open a position and move on, Pear is built around tracking what traders are doing across multiple venues at once.

How Pear Connects Social Trading and Prediction Markets

Prediction markets have an audience fragmentation problem. Traders navigate between separate apps (one for sports outcomes, one for political events, one for crypto markets) with no shared social context.

Privy, which handles Pear's account authentication, described the product as "bringing prediction markets into a single social, mobile-first experience" where users can "track portfolios, discover traders, follow activity, and execute across venues without jumping between apps." The platform's tagline, "Back your instincts. Follow top traders, discover markets, and trade what you believe," captures the intended usage pattern: surfacing both personal conviction and social signal while leaving execution to the user.

Built on Solana, the platform organizes markets into categories including World Cup, Sports, Politics, Crypto, Culture, and Tech, with a unified portfolio tracker and P&L view spanning a user's activity across all of them. The interface is built for mobile.

From Viral Waitlist to Open Beta in Six Weeks

Pear launched its waitlist on June 9 with a single post: "Trading alone was never the end state. The future is connected. One account. Every market." That announcement drew 25,900 likes, 25,800 retweets, and 564,000 views, substantial traction for a product not yet available.

Six weeks later, the open beta went live. Pear's launch post crossed 80,000 views within 14 hours and nearly 2,000 retweets. A day before, Pear had set the framing: "Pear wasn't built to replace prediction markets. It was built to connect them."

The Social Layer for Prediction Markets

Social trading (seeing a skilled trader's positions and optionally mirroring them) is established in both traditional finance and spot crypto. Pear applies that model to on-chain prediction markets: users follow experienced traders, view their active positions across market categories, and surface markets they might not otherwise discover.

The product runs on a single account across prediction market venues: one login, one portfolio view, activity spanning multiple underlying markets. That unified account layer is the platform's functional differentiation from trading any single prediction market directly.

The beta is open to all users at beta.pear.trade. The rewards program running since June continues alongside it, with users earning points through quests on the platform.