Polymarket, which is quickly emerging as the most popular blockchain-based betting marketplace, has hired renowned statistician and election commentator Nate Silver from Axios as an advisor. Reported On Tuesday.
Prediction markets, once relegated to the realm of academic theory, are now a way to pool knowledge among a crowd of users. In theory, and increasingly in practice, these users are incentivized to shed their biases by investing money in voting. This is called “skin in the game.”
Founded in 2020, Polymarket has become one of the most popular sites for betting on the US elections. The poll asks who will win the presidential election, which is scheduled to end on November 4, 2024. $262 million is at stake. youCurrently, sers favor former President Donald Trump, whose rankings have soared to over 70% since the assassination attempt over the weekend. Axios reports that Polymarket sees over 80% of global predictions centered around the U.S. election.
Trump regularly posts Polymarket favorability ratings on his social media platform, Truth Social. Polymarket one of the first Speculation that Trump would select JD Vance as his running mate was made official on Monday.
Founded by New York native Shane Coughlan, Polymarket has raised $70 million in venture capital, including from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. More than $400 million in trades were made on the platform in 2024 alone. However, it is not open to US users due to strict Commodity Futures Trading Commission restrictions on “binary markets.”
Coughlan has said in the past that he was influenced by Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises when he developed polymarkets, a way of using markets to tap into the wisdom of the crowd.
Silver, who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for predicting the outcome of 49 states in the 2008 U.S. presidential election on the website FiveThirtyEight, told Axios that he expects the investor community to increasingly use betting markets to evaluate news and more accurately predict future outcomes.
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