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Forbes Unveils Polymarket: The 26-Year-Old Founder and the Billion-Dollar Prediction Market

How likely is it that Vice President Kamala Harris will defeat former President Donald Trump in November? On a prediction website called Polymarket, thousands of betting results show Harris’s odds at 39%, Trump’s odds at 59%, and Michelle Obama and Robert Kennedy Jr. each at 1%. Will J.D. Vance’s position as Trump’s VP candidate be replaced? If Vance drops out, a $100 bet could return $1,000.

 

Welcome to the future of prediction markets, where almost anything can be bet on—from Bitcoin’s highest price in 2024, to the speed at which Trump or Biden climbs stairs, and even the gender of Hailey and Justin Bieber’s unborn child. On Polymarket, around $446 million is currently wagered on the outcome of the November presidential election. However, betting on election outcomes is illegal in the U.S., as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) deems it against public interest. Based in New York City, Polymarket has become a phenomenal prediction market, largely due to the world’s attention on U.S. politics.

 

According to data from Dune Analytics, Polymarket launched in 2020, and this year alone, trading volume has surpassed $650 million, with nearly $300 million traded in July alone. The platform is expected to handle $1 billion in prediction bets by the end of the year. Campaign managers and political analysts now turn to this unconventional oracle for clues in the fluctuating market prices. Even former President Trump boasted about his winning odds on Polymarket on his social media app TruthSocial.

 

Polymarket is built on a blockchain network called Polygon, which operates 24/7, with transaction fees only a fraction of Ethereum’s costs. However, users must use USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, rather than traditional dollars to trade on Polymarket. But this is also changing: Last Wednesday, Polymarket announced a partnership with Miami-based MoonPay, enabling users to place bets via bank transfers and credit cards.

This prediction market’s soaring popularity has drawn top investors, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who have provided $74 million in total funding to this startup. Currently, U.S. election-related markets (more than 100) account for most of Polymarket’s transaction volume. According to web analytics platform Similarweb, though these markets are supposedly closed to U.S. residents, 25% of the site’s traffic comes from the U.S. Polymarket’s 26-year-old founder Shayne Coplan prefers to emphasize the platform’s strengths rather than elaborate on his team’s efforts to prevent U.S. users from betting on elections.

 

“Polymarket turns what would have been internet arguments into a marketplace where those with the correct predictions are rewarded. We want our predictions to be everywhere, to go mainstream,” Coplan said from his luxurious penthouse office in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.

 

This article is sourced from Foresightnews:

https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/65604

Sincerely,

AIC Team

October 7, 2024