The first debate for the 2020 US presidential election ended with crypto prediction platforms going against Donald Trump.
Election futures on crypto exchange FTX surged, with the platform’s CEO reporting more than $4 million in open interest, trying to pick the winner between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump. On FTX, Trump’s unexpected debate performance was met with widespread rejection and caused a 10% drop in the price of futures that support his reelection.
Volumes on FTX are boosted by leverage. On prediction platforms that don’t offer leverage, more modest six-figure volumes were recorded. Polymarket saw more than $100,000 in volume flow in the “Trump will win the 2020 US presidential election” market on September 30, with the same sentiment shifting against the president during the debate.
Nearly 55% believe Trump will not win the election.
Polymarket founder Shayne Coplantold Cointelegraph that the platform was designed to provide answers to questions that “people actually want to know about, not just things they want to assume.”
“The beautiful thing about markets, in my opinion, is their ability to aggregate information and synthesize it into accurate predictions. That’s price discovery – gathering everyone’s opinions and knowledge, and synthesizing it into one metric. And that can have incredible social and informational value.”
Polymarket is based on Ethereum (ETH), however, it is exploring Matic as a scaling solution for the interim period leading up to the launch of ETH 2.0, while transactions executed on the platform carry no fees.
The platform uses an automatic market maker (AMM) for price discovery, with all market participants effectively trading against the AMM’s liquidity pool. Market ideas can be submitted by users and curated by the company’s executives to ensure that the terms and conditions surrounding specific markets are “clear.”
