I love Polymarket

Fireplace is happy to announce that we've raised $1.5M to build the smartest trading terminal for prediction markets. 🧵

“Did you place some on Kalshi” 😭 Dame a troll bruh

(New Essay) The Machinery of Modern Finance On why I think the next ten years of financial innovation will surpass the prior fifty. Give it a read. brandonkumar.substack.com/p/…

It’s easy to criticize “dopamine markets” when you’re sitting on a multi-billion dollar foundation that only has value due to retail speculation. Platforms like @Polymarket and @Kalshi don’t have the luxury of selling $ETH to fund ideological experiments — they have to build products people actually want. Speculation bootstraps liquidity. Liquidity enables hedging. You don’t get serious financial infrastructure without first attracting volume. Capitalism isn’t “corposlop.” It’s market discovery. This is what the average better wants. Let markets evolve organically. The “useful” stuff like insurance baskets and institutional hedging products will come in with time. Capitalism innovates faster than socialism in the end 🤝

Roundhill just filed for a bunch of ETFs that track prediction markets for political elections. Using event contracts. Potentially groundbreaking. If this goes through wow opens up huge door to all kinds of stuff. Ht ⁦@Todd_Sohn⁩

Recently I have been starting to worry about the state of prediction markets, in their current form. They have achieved a certain level of success: market volume is high enough to make meaningful bets and have a full-time job as a trader, and they often prove useful as a supplement to other forms of news media. But also, they seem to be over-converging to an unhealthy product market fit: embracing short-term cryptocurrency price bets, sports betting, and other similar things that have dopamine value but not any kind of long-term fulfillment or societal information value. My guess is that teams feel motivated to capitulate to these things because they bring in large revenue during a bear market where people are desperate - an understandable motive, but one that leads to corposlop. I have been thinking about how we can help get prediction markets out of this rut. My current view is that we should try harder to push them into a totally different use case: hedging, in a very generalized sense (TLDR: we're gonna replace fiat currency) Prediction markets have two types of actors: (i) "smart traders" who provide information to the market, and earn money, and necessarily (ii) some kind of actor who loses money. But who would be willing to lose money and keep coming back? There are basically three answers to this question: 1. "Naive traders": people with dumb opinions who bet on totally wrong things 2. "Info buyers": people who set up money-losing automated market makers, to motivate people to trade on markets to help the info buyer learn information they do not know. 3. "Hedgers": people who are -EV in a linear sense, but who use the market as insurance, reducing their risk. (1) is where we are today. IMO there is nothing fundamentally morally wrong with taking money from people with dumb opinions. But there still is something fundamentally "cursed" about relying on this too much. It gives the platform the incentive to seek out traders with dumb opinions, and create a public brand and community that encourages dumb opinions to get more people to come in. This is the slide to corposlop. (2) has always been the idealistic hope of people like Robin Hanson. However, info buying has a public goods problem: you pay for the info, but everyone in the world gets it, including those who don't pay. There are limited cases where it makes sense for one org to pay (esp. decision markets), but even there, it seems likely that the market volumes achieved with that strategy will not be too high. This gets us to (3). Suppose that you have shares in a biotech company. It's public knowledge that the Purple Party is better for biotech than the Yellow Party. So if you buy a prediction market share betting that the Yellow Party will win the next election, on average, you are reducing your risk. Mathematical example: suppose that if Purple wins, the share price will be a dice roll between [80...120], and if Yellow wins, it's between [60...100]. If you make a size $10 bet that Yellow will win, your earnings become equivalent to a dice roll between [70...110] in both cases. Taking a logarithmic model of utility, this risk reduction is worth $0.58. Now, let's get to a more fascinating example. What do people who want stablecoins ultimately want? They want price stability. They have some future expenses in mind, and they want a guarantee that will be able to pay those expenses. But if crypto grows on top of USD-backed stablecoins, crypto is ultimately not truly decentralized. Furthermore, different people have different types of expenses. There has been lots of thinking about making an "ideal stablecoin" that is based on some decentralized global price index, but what if the real solution is to go a step further, and get rid of the concept of currency altogether? Here's the idea. You have price indices on all major categories of goods and services that people buy (treating physical goods/services in different regions as different categories), and prediction markets on each category. Each user (individual or business) has a local LLM that understands that user's expenses, and offers the user a personalized basket of prediction market shares, representing "N days of that user's expected future expenses". Now, we do not need fiat currency at all! People can hold stocks, ETH, or whatever else to grow wealth, and personalized prediction market shares when they want stability. Both of these examples require prediction markets denominated in an asset people want to hold, whether interest-bearing fiat, wrapped stocks, or ETH. Non-interest-bearing fiat has too-high opportunity cost, that overwhelms the hedging value. But if we can make it work, it's much more sustainable than the status quo, because both sides of the equation are likely to be long-term happy with the product that they are buying, and very large volumes of sophisticated capital will be willing to participate. Build the next generation of finance, not corposlop.

I believe Prediction Markets are violating the law. In 40 states we have regulated betting that can’t market to teenagers, pays state taxes, protects game integrity & reports suspicious activity to law enforcement. Prediction markets do none of that at all ms.now/morning-joe/watch/chr…

Probably nothing.

🐳 Behind every Prediction Market trade is a complex system most people overlook. When results drop: • Who verifies the outcome? • Who ensures losers pay winners? • Who manages risk if one side can't settle? This is where Financial Infrastructure kicks in: ➥ Clearing: Verifying and matching trades between parties ➥ Settlement: Final asset transfer after results ➥ Risk Management: Handling counterparty risk These are the invisible "circulatory systems". Without them, markets collapse. But who's building this infrastructure for on-chain prediction markets? @willyLee dropped a solid piece answering exactly this. It reframes how we should look at @Polymarket. Not as a prediction product, but as a financial layer being quietly built underneath. Key insights here 👇 whales.market/blog/the-finan…