How Blockchain Bettors View the 2024 U.S. Election

Users of Blockchain based prediction market. Poly market have put up nearly $5 million so far to bet on the outcome of the Republican presidential nomination race. Joining us now to discuss with Poly Market Director of Global Markets, Harry Jones, welcome to the show, Harry, good morning guys. All right, let's let's talk about this. Traditionally, we turn to polls for opinions but Poly markets front runner like most polling is Donald Trump. Uh talk to us about the election polls that are going on on poly market right now. Um And how you see your platform playing into the upcoming elections. Uh Well, British markets have often been referred to as sort of the holy grail of blockchains. And a lot of the reason for that is that the they generate probabilities. And obviously, uh in the context of an election, uh real time probability is very interesting and useful um to sort of understand what's going on. So, in the context of this election, for example, uh you can see Donald Trump training at 71 cents and the sense represent the probability, which means 71 cents translates to 71% likelihood that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. So you'll see that he's the front runner. But you also see that De San and Vivek have sort of, uh, taken second place, a shared second place at around 14 cents. The interesting thing, uh, if you go on party market, you'll see that Vivek has risen basically from about five cents on July 1st to now he's trading at 13 cents or so. So, in terms of like the way things are shifting. Vivec certainly seems like he's gained the most momentum. Uh but it's very clearly still the case that Trump is the far out front runner and it's really up to up to the other candidates to do something about that. Since the platform is not actually, I'll just go super quickly onto since the platform is not actually available in the United States, can we, can we actually look at this polling data as an indicator for what's going to happen next year? Yeah. Well, just because it's not available to trade in the United States doesn't mean the odds aren't useful that the odds aren't uh viewable in the United States. A lot of people in the in the United States use our, use our markets as a as their number one indicator of what uh the likelihoods are of X and Y and Z events happening. So that applies primarily to politics where there's people who trade these things full time, experts who distill polls like you know, you can look at Nate Silver's 5 38 you can look at what all these uh pundits and pollsters are saying about the election, the job of the market is as you know, to distill these polls and to distill what the experts are saying into uh a price. Um just because you can't trade them in America doesn't mean that there aren't savvy traders outside of America who understand how to distill American news and polls uh into an accurate pricing. So, uh I think you would find that even if they were available to trade in America, the prices would be identical to what they are right now. Could you just give us a sense of what happened in the last election on your platform? I believe things were dramatic, it was volatile, you know, a lot, a lot changed very quickly as the results were coming in on the last day. Yeah. Well, uh so there are a lot of people who trade prediction markets, especially politics as their full time job. So what you'll see on a lot of election nights is that people go crazy sort of with the opportunity because as these, as the news comes out, uh for example, in the last election, it was looking like, uh you know, the, the the market was trading with Biden more likely to begin with and then poll polls and exit polling started coming out and it started to look like uh uh Trump was gaining traction and as these swings and ebbs and flows happen, uh the odds change in real time and obviously a lot of people make money not just on uh getting the outcome correct. Um but being able to price things as they, as they happen. So, yeah, I, I think the last election was a very, very volatile example of that. You saw the same sort of thing with the midterms, whether or not that happens at this election, I don't know, but you can be sure that uh there will be a lot of people viewing uh prediction markets, poly market in particular as their opportunity to profit off the election. And what you see on election night as people look for this profit opportunity and these arbitrage opportunities is that the pricing updates in real time. So if you want to get a, a accurate real time sense of what the actual odds of your candidate winning or who's in the lead or what's going on, you shouldn't be looking at polls, you should be looking at prediction markets because prediction markets aggregate these polls and tell you what the odds are based on all of these different sources of information coming in rather than just trusting one source. All right, Harry, we are gonna have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us this morning. Thank you. That was poly Market Director of Global Markets. Harry Jones.