My very long take on a potential Polymarket token, and the alleged $9b valuation. (Kalshi also has a nosebleed valuation, but I'm going to focus on Polymarket specifically here because of the rumored airdrop for users) I've been trading on Polymarket since January 2021, managed to do large volume. I trade on this site (and similar markets) because I really like it. It's my job and also my favorite hobby. I've traded stocks/bet sports/played poker, but prediction markets are the best fit for me for two reasons: (1) I can trade things that I care about/find fun and (2) these markets very much distill skill from luck in the long run. On the topic of Polymarket's token specifically, people are always talking to me about valuations, and airdrops, and timing (especially whether it's the "right time" yet for an airdrop). I've been told unprompted by friends that my airdrop will be 'massive.' I usually just say "yeah maybe" and I don't think about it. It's not under my control in any way...plus, I can't know whether the amount I could get is minuscule or significant. Basing any decisions around it would be silly. BUT, my personal hesitance to get excited aside, I do know one thing: if it did happen, I would be very reticent to sell any tokens. In fact, I would probably buy more. $9b to me (if that's the valuation of a token) doesn't seem high, at all. Why's that? Well, the problem for prediction markets was always one thing: it was a niche product. It was gimmicky, for dorks. Average people didn't know what they were, barely cared. It was an oddity. You needed to educate people before adoption. That is no longer the case. The average crypto person is very well aware of Polymarket, and we're approaching the point where the average non-crypto person has at least heard of this and at least loosely understands its conveying some meaning. Now that education is well on the way, it's a matter of making it easier to onboard users for mass adoption (something that Polymarket's competitor Kalshi is currently excelling at via fiat partnerships). --- Even still, as hyped as prediction markets are right now, I think people underappreciate the full scope of all of this. And this is not a message from a shill. It's a message from someone who is doing this as my job in the world for a long time, and from thinking about what it is. Polymarket is at the nexus of many valuable things: (1) As a company, it is the nexus of the blockchain and financial markets. The blockchain wants to get into financial markets and be taken seriously -- and financial markets want to get onto the blockchain, and stay apace with new technology. Will Polymarket merge these two worlds to an effective degree? Maybe. If the answer is yes, $9b is stupid low. (2) As a market for users, Polymarket is at the nexus of importance and fun. For instance: betting with a sportsbook when you get off work is fun, but not very important; and pricing bond default risk via an RFQ to your trading desk may be important, but it's not many people's idea of fun. Polymarket is both a consumer product, for someone who is just making a bet on something not super serious (is Trump going to say the term "illegal alien" in his speech?), AND it is a professional product for very high-level traders trying to predict something that is more complex (like what the Federal Reserve is going to do 6 months from now). You can have a portfolio of $10.79 and be betting only on cricket matches. You can have a portfolio of $25m and be market making the next world leaders in various countries. (3) These markets will be intertwined with AI to make us all smarter. And that's not AI as a buzzword. Artificial intelligence will be utilized to give us better ways to make preditions for the future, and then those predictions being tested in the real world will be utilized to make AI even more intelligent. It's a virtuous cycle of improving our forecasting, baby-step by baby-step. And we need to get smarter, because humans and prediction markets are not even close to being great at forecasting. The term Prediction Market and the word efficient don't belong in the same sentence. Things are wrong all the time. Now, don't misunderstand, humans and markets are certainly better than we were 20 years ago at forecasting! But that's a very low bar. We need to get better at figuring out what's coming, and a market like Polymarket will legitimately assist with that. This is not some inconsequential or theoretical problem -- if decisionmakers figured out that COVID was more serious a few days earlier (I think that was the indication from Polymarket and its users), would our quality of life be better today because of it? Would Trump have easily won re-election in 2020? If Powell, et al had figured out that inflation was NOT transitory two meetings before they did figure it out circa 2022 (another one where Polymarket traders had a strong inkling), would they have curtailed the worst of inflation? Would Biden have a decent chance at being re-elected? Forecasting is legitimately very important, with large ramifications on the world for being slow or wrong. Polymarket, in an idealized world, will make us incrementally smarter and faster. --- Finally, on timing: does Polymarket need to wait for a bull market to drop a token? I doubt that enters the calculus. This is not a fly-by-night operation. My read on the company/the founder is that the point isn't to get rich from a token and go sip drinks on an island somewhere. The vision is bigger. The token will underpin the site, and likely be intergrated into both market creation and market resolutions. It will be a necessary utility. The point of the token isn't a high valuation (although that matters obviously). The point is the effectiveness of the whole endeavor. To me, the timing of when this all happens is probably moot: Polymarket dropping a token (and everything that will happen in relation to that) might just create or hasten a bull market by itself. That take is rooted in a couple of things...my belief that stablecoins are the best technology on the blockchain. And also rooted in my other belief, albeit biased, that Polymarket is the best consumer-facing app in crypto (it utilizes stablecoins, to boot). So when your best app, with your best technology, launches a potentially massive consumer financial product and token, that's a big deal. It may go mainstream rapidly. You'll have a flotilla of new users being "on-chain" (and find out its not so scary). That's a scenario where the tide raises all the boats. So...yeah, $9b is maybe way too low, and everyone in crypto should be rooting for Polymarket's success. To me, the big challenge for Polymarket was going from a $1m company to a $1b company. At this point, it just seems inevitable. Fin. -- Addendum to all this: Polymarket is a market with traders, yeah? And I think that's how people think about it. Some betting app or whatever. Which is not totally wrong. But facilitating trading is not the product. The product of Polymarket is information. Think about Wikipedia. Visitors vastly outnumber editors. Do you visit to learn or edit it? Most people in the world will not interact with Polymarket to predict anything. They won't sign up, let alone deposit a single dollar. But they will interact with the product of Polymarket. They will hear the numbers on TV. They will read about the odds of rate cuts in a story. Or maybe visit the site and see whether some recent political scandal is going to lead a politician's resignation. Which is not to downplay the opportunity here for prediction markets. There will be a ton of trading, on everything. But the importance of this platform, the product it delivers, lives in the quality of the forecasts.
