Polymarket

 Basics

• Founded in:
• Mainnet release:
• Based in: NYC
• Prediction Market
• Polymarket, an information markets platform

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].
• From their website (7-8-2020):

"Polymarket is for informational purposes only. We take no custody of anyone's money or cryptocurrency, nor do we host any markets ourselves. Polymarket displays existing markets live on the Ethereum blockchain and is a graphical user interface for interfacing with said smart contracts via Web 3 enabled wallets."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here]. Seems like they won't have any due to taking the tech from Gnosis.
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: Polygon and the Conditional Tokens Framework by Gnosis with an AMM. According to a conversation with a team member in their Telegram chat (9-8-2020), their tech is completely taken from Gnosis, nothing else added.

How it works

• From their website (9-7-2020):

"Polymarket hosts information markets that harness the wisdom of the crowd to accurately forecast the future, empowering speculators to profit from their knowledge and spectators to make better decisions. Free markets are the most effective information aggregators, and Polymarket applies that to the real world. There are 3 roles in Polymarket:

Speculators

Speculators trade shares that represent different outcomes to real world events. If the outcome happens, the share resolves to $1, if it doesn’t, it resolves to $0. The price of a share represents the likelihood that the event occurs. Do you feel confident in a future event? Put your money where your mouth is and get paid for being right!

Spectators

Spectators easily derive actionable insight from market activity that empowers them to more accurately assess the future events that affect them the most, and make better decisions accordingly. Follow relevant markets, track up to date odds for free, and avoid falling victim to fake news.

Liquidity Providers (Beta)

Provide liquidity by committing USDC to a given market’s liquidity pool and earn fees every time someone trades. By providing liquidity you are helping the market produce more accurate information and can withdraw your liquidity at any time. This is in beta and should be used only by those familiar with how Automated Market Makers work."

Scaling

• Built on Matic Network (4-11-2020).

Oracle Method

• "All the markets are resolved according to their specified resolution source, at the final discretion of a market integrity committee."

Compliance

• Polymarket said to be under investigation by CFTC. The report of the probe comes as the company is said to be in talks to raise money at a nearly $1 billion valuation (23-10-2021).
• From Bitcoin.com (4-1-2022):

"The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has ordered a “decentralized” prediction market platform to shut down non-compliant markets and pay a fine of $1.4 million. “Polymarket had been operating an illegal unregistered or non-designated facility for event-based binary options online trading contracts, known as ‘event markets,'” said the derivatives regulator."

Usage

• From Bitcoin.com (1-11-2024):

"By examining on-chain data, blockchain analytics company, Chaos Labs, found that roughly “one-third of trading volume—and overall users—on the presidential market alone was likely wash trading.” They reached similar conclusions for other markets. In a separate investigation, Inca Digital also attributed a “significant portion of the volume … to potential wash trading.”

• The platform has seen over $3 billion in bets related to the election, adding over 140,000 new accounts in October 2024 alone.
• Polymarket has registered $39.5 million in volume over the past 28 days across 2,600 active wallets, according to a Dune dashboard (14-5-2024).

Competition

• Augur, Omen, Gnosis

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Shayne Coplan; founder

Funding

• Polymarket announced Tuesday that it raised $70 million in two fundings rounds:

"The Series B funding round that Buterin participated in also saw allocations from Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, the crypto venture fund Dragonfly, and the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, which led the $45 million funding round. That was preceded by a $25 million Series A funding round led by the early-stage venture capital firm General Catalyst, which also saw participation from Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia."

• Raised $4M from Polychain, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srnivasan, Meltem Demirors, Robert Leshner of Compound, Aave’s Stani Kulechov, Synthetix’s Kain Warwick, major crypto VCs ParaFi and 1confirmation, Tarun Chitra, Kal Vepuri, Josh Hannah, Marc Bhargava, Samir Vasavada, and Calvin Liu. (19-10-2020).

 (:

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