DEXs
- Working decentralized prediction market
- US company, NYC-based
- Polygon-based (ETH L2 chain)
- AMM (probably like uniswap) with liquidity providers who earn 2% fee
- No fees / Doesn't currently make any money
- Markets created & resolved by Polymarket
- USDC-denominated
- Yahoo profile of Polymarket
- "Hanson said Polymarket should add conditional variations on the questions people can raise"
- "because Polymarket doesn’t book revenue – Coplan gave a non-committal response when asked if he was thinking about monetizing it – and because it never launched a token, it might become an accepted part of the internet’s open architecture."
- Cumbersome onboarding experience:
- To avoid paying the Ethereum network fees, you have to create a crypto.com wallet, move money from your exchange to the wallet, do KYC for crypto.com, and transfer USDC from there to Polymarket using the Polygon side-chain—if you send it as an Ethereum transaction, the money is lost.
- Under Investigation by CFTC for noncompliance
- Legal counsel, James McDonald, of Sullivan & Cromwell (top firm), used to oversee investigations at the CFTC.
- Volume of top contract on homepage: ~$200k
- Contract topics: covid, crypto, US politics, sports, entertainment
- Betting on war, global conflicts prohibited in ToS
- Forbes profile: $4M seed round in 2020
- "$4 million investment round featuring some of the biggest names in crypto and tech. The massive early round was lead by Polychain Capital with major participation from AngelList co-founder and closely followed investor Naval Ravikant, though the manifest of big-name investors hardly ends there. Other notable participants include industry stalwarts Balaji Srinivasan, 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."
- Founded 2018, current offering launched in summer 2020
- Founder Shayne Coplan, NYU CS dropout, last venture: union.market, ETH defi platform
- Discord
- Getting Started on Polymarket