Fliq by EthosX turns trading into a yes-or-no question
The YC S22 team built serious on-chain derivatives plumbing. Then it built the thing normal people could actually use - a creator-led prediction market for the roughly 95% of people who never trade.
There is a number the founders of Fliq keep coming back to. In the United States, somewhere between half and two-thirds of adults hold a position in some kind of market. In India, the figure is closer to five or six percent. Same appetite for a wager, same instinct to have an opinion about tomorrow - wildly different access. Fliq, the consumer app built by the YC Summer 2022 company EthosX, was designed around that gap, and around a suspicion that the missing 95% were kept out by design, not by disinterest.
The pitch is almost stubbornly simple. Trading, on Fliq, is a single question with two answers. Will this team win? Will this stock close higher? Will the movie open above a number? You pick yes or no, you put down real money in USDT, and you settle on-chain. No candlestick charts, no order-book depth, no jargon that assumes you already spent a decade on a trading desk. Fliq describes the feel it is chasing bluntly: as engaging as TikTok, as accessible as Spotify.
In markets like India, only 5-6% of people trade, versus 50-60% in the US.
The gap Fliq was built around01 / THE ORIGINFrom a JP Morgan clearing desk to a meme market
The unlikely part is where Fliq came from. Its parent company, EthosX, was not founded by consumer-app people. CEO Deepanshu spent close to a decade in quantitative finance, most recently as a VP of Quantitative Research in JP Morgan Chase's Global Derivatives Clearing business - the machinery that stands between the world's banks and the trades they make with each other. He holds an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Calcutta. His co-founder, Smit Patoliya, came out of IIT Madras with an options-trading background.
When the two started EthosX in 2022, the ambition was infrastructural: put financial derivatives directly on blockchains, and strip out the intermediaries - the exchanges, clearinghouses, depositories and clearing banks - that Deepanshu had spent his career inside. Y Combinator summed the S22 company up as "building infrastructure for trading financial derivatives on blockchains for crypto companies and financial institutions, removing intermediaries, counterparty risk and settlement risk."
That work was real. EthosX shipped crypto options, then SWITCH, a perpetual rolled-over put-options product, and an institutional OTC platform with request-for-quote pricing and on-chain clearing. In December 2023 it closed $1.8 million from a mix of crypto and traditional-finance names - Franklin Templeton, Y Combinator, Emurgo Ventures, Token Metrics, and Bloom Institute founder Austen Allred among them - bringing the company's total to roughly $2.3 million.
And yet the interesting move was lateral. Somewhere between the OTC desks and the lending-protocol liquidation products, the team seems to have noticed that the derivatives stack they'd built - non-custodial, on-chain, no counterparty to trust - was also the plumbing for something far more approachable than institutional puts. A prediction is, after all, just a derivative wearing casual clothes. Fliq is what happened when they dressed it down.
02 / THE PRODUCTCreators make the markets
The other half of Fliq, led by founder Surbhi Singh - a fintech operator who has worked at Deutsche Borse and GSR - is a distribution idea. Rather than a single global feed of markets picked by a team in California, Fliq hands the market-making to creators. More than 60 local creators across Asia, Europe, South America, Africa and North America design questions their own audiences actually care about: a cricket result, an election, a music-chart position, a bit of internet drama. The creator launches the market, their community trades it, and the creator shares in the revenue.
Every feature came from community suggestions rather than top-down planning.
Fliq's build philosophyThat decision solves two problems at once - the language barrier and the relevance barrier - that generic prediction markets rarely touch. It also gave Fliq an organic growth loop. The team says the community grew from 30 early testers to more than 2,000 members before any real push. On testnet, 3,500+ active traders posted a 45% profitability rate the company calls above industry norms. A limited mainnet run put 1,000+ qualified traders through the system with, they report, zero fund losses and no major infrastructure failures.
Under the hood, Fliq runs on the Aptos blockchain, chosen for cheap, fast, reliable settlement, and trades in USDT. Recently the app itself moved into a Telegram bot - a pragmatic choice in a part of the world where chat apps, not app stores, are where products get discovered and used. It is listed in the Aptos ecosystem directory and has been expanding onto Instagram to meet the creator audiences where they already are.
03 / THE MODELHow Fliq makes money - and who pays
The business model borrows from two worlds Fliq's founders know intimately. From finance comes the trading layer: Fliq takes its cut from activity in the markets, the way any venue earns on volume rather than on a subscription. From the creator economy comes the twist: the people launching markets are not costs to be marketed at, they are partners who share in what their markets generate. That alignment is the quiet engine. A creator with 50,000 followers has every reason to make their market good, promote it, and keep it running, because their upside rises with participation. It turns marketing spend into revenue share and, if it works, makes each new creator cheaper to acquire than the last.
Sitting beneath the consumer app is EthosX's original business - the institutional derivatives infrastructure it still operates. On-chain clearing, portfolio margin, request-for-quote pricing, and liquidation-protection products for lending protocols are B2B lines that serve other crypto companies rather than retail users. In practice Fliq gets to stand on rails that were stress-tested for institutions, which is an unusual starting point for a consumer app and part of why the team can credibly talk about settlement guarantees instead of hoping for them.
The expertise on hand is a specific one. This is a team that understands both sides of the trade it is simplifying - the market microstructure a bank clearing desk lives in, and the settlement mechanics that decide whether a payout actually lands. That is rarer than it sounds. Plenty of consumer-crypto teams can build a slick front end and outsource the hard financial parts; far fewer have run quantitative research inside a global clearing business first. Fliq's simplicity is the output of people who know exactly how much complexity they are hiding.
04 / THE MARKETWhere Fliq sits
Prediction markets are having a moment. Polymarket and Kalshi have made "the odds" a mainstream reference point in the US, particularly around elections. Fliq is playing a different position on the same field. Where the incumbents optimize for a global, English-speaking, crypto-literate or regulation-bound audience, Fliq is optimizing for the person who has never opened a brokerage account and does not think of themselves as a trader at all.
That is both the opportunity and the risk. The upside is an enormous, underserved base - starting with India and scaling to what the team frames as billions of people globally. The challenge is the familiar one for real-money consumer products in emerging markets: regulation, payments, trust, and the slow work of proving that "no fund losses" stays true as volume grows. Fliq's answer leans on the same on-chain, non-custodial design EthosX built for institutions - the settlement guarantees are the product, not a feature bolted on top.
Making trading as engaging as TikTok and as accessible as Spotify.
Fliq's stated benchmarkWhat you can actually do with Fliq today is unglamorous in the best way. Find a question you have a view on. Tap yes or no. Put down a few dollars of USDT. If you are a creator, spin up a market for your own audience and earn when they play. It is trading stripped to the one decision most people are already making in their heads - and, for a company that started life clearing derivatives for banks, that may be the most sophisticated thing about it.
05 / THE TIMELINEHow it got here
Fliq is early, and the honest version of its story is that plenty is still unproven - regulatory clarity, retention past the novelty, whether creator-made markets stay fun at scale. But the shape of the bet is clear and unusually specific: the next wave of traders will not be recruited from Wall Street. They will arrive already assembled, in the comment sections of people they follow, one yes-or-no question at a time.