Polymarket Is the Fastest Growing Crypto App. How BIG Can It Get? w/ Zeneca

Intro GM good morning welcome to the milk Road show The Daily crypto show that makes you feel more accomplished than parallel parking perfectly in one go I'm your host Jay Hamilton and today we're talking about the hottest consumer crypto app right now that no one seems to be talking about I'm talking about poly market and here to guide us is zenica back for another week he knows a lot about this because he was a professional Gambler for over 15 years Zen great to have you back on the show great to be back as always um yeah looking forward to shouting at Poly market and everything else yeah I'm What does Zeneca think about Polymarket? going to start with this tweet from Yuga eth he said poly Market's astronomical success is the most important story in crypto right now but it's so obvious that we are ignoring it when we should be screaming about it from the rooftop so we're here today to drink some milk and scream about this fast growing consumer crypto app the numbers are truly off the charts let's just take a look at a few of these numbers to give every an idea of why this is so big right now if we look at monthly volume total volume poly Market since their Inception po Market has been around for over four years they've done about 660 million in total volume but in June alone they did over 110 million in total volume they've got 30,000 active traders in June 20,000 new accounts in June and they've done this all without a token which feels like an absolute anomaly in crypto Zen what do you think about poly Market in these crazy numbers that they're doing right now I think it's great I'm a big big fan of poly Market it's sort of it's found product Market fit in a way that very few other crypto apps have I think uh there's a couple points one is that we're seeing like the gamification of everything happen in the world around us you look at like video games and loot boxes and people gambling on that and it sort of like caters into that but even aside from that it sort of fills the void of you're sitting in a bar or a pub or you're watching a football game at someone's house and you're like hey I wonder like you know I think this and the other person says oh no I I think you're wrong I think the other side you want to bet on it if you're sitting right next to a friend you can bet on it with that friend but if you're not and you have that idea you can go on to poly market now and make that bet and anyone else in the world can come and take the other side and I think that's the sort of the power and advantage of it it's sort of like unlocked Global liquidity for betting um on literally anything anyone can come up with anything that they want and as long as say um someone that is willing to take the other side you've got a bet and it's trustless it's you know done with crypto smart contracts there's no needing to trust an intermediary it's all it's just great What are the bets happening on Polymarket? honestly I'm a big fan of it okay so for those who don't know poly Market well let's just take a look at some of the bets that are happening right now because I think it'll paint the picture of exactly what poly Market is Zen can you take us through a few of these here yeah um I mean before we do these like you have the big ones like is Trump going to win is Biden going to win is stuff like that but then you all like football games um but then you have the fun ones I guess this one here is a Taylor Swift going to be engaged in 2024 currently it looks like there's a 39% chance or 39% of people say yes so if you think yes she's going to get engaged you can bet on this if you think no she's not going to get engaged you can bet on this and depending on how many people have bet on either side um you'll get better or worse Els um is she going to be pregnant in 2020 4 33% chance of yes so if you think there is a more than 33% chance she will be pregnant this year you can go and bet and and make some money if you think she's not take the other side this is a funny one will the United States confirm that aliens exist in 2024 um an 8% chance of yes um that's obviously too high like there's not an 8% chance the United States is going to say aliens are going to exist um most likely What's Happening Here I haven't had a close look is that someone's made this bet and there's very little money if any bet on it so if you came along with like I want to bet $10,000 that United States is not going to say aliens exist what will happen then is the odds you will get will dramatically decrease and it'll be like 99 plus percent that they will say that they do not exist whatever you want does is the Doge ETF going to be approved in 2024 um 6% chance it's funny that people based on the last two slides think there's a higher chance that aliens exist than the do gtf will be approved in 202 for um yeah you'll see some crazy stuff on here but it just goes to show you people you can literally bet on anything if if you think about it you can bet on it you know if you're sharp there's actually probably a lot of really good money to be made because most people betting are not professional gamblers or not smart or Savvy or or have a strong understanding of what they're doing compared to traditional sports betting um if you bet on football basketball baseball Esports whatever um or or like the US election that's where you have really smart money people that have been doing this for years with all sorts of analytics platforms and um all the data they've been pulling in you know they have algorithms they have machine learning um AI tools to help them determine hey we got all this information all these players who's going to win the match people don't have that information about whether do GF will be approved or if Taylor R is going to get pregnant so it's really just use your brain think about what's more likely and and try and pick de side that's more likely to to to hit based on the odds and obviously there's a general view that if you get enough people Can Polymarket be used as a prediction tool? participating in a bet then you're probably getting a fairly good indication of the likelihood of it happening obviously if you know and you can look at these bets in poly market and see how much volume is in that bet the alien bet had like $7,000 of volume so like clearly that's not an accurate representation as you said but these larger bets as they become more Global as more people get involved probably a fairly good indication of where where we think the prediction will go yeah I'm a massive believer that um as the amount bet scales up more likely it is to be a true and accurate representation of the real odds also goes up people talk about it all the time you you'll see I think part of the reason it's blowing up right now is that with the US election coming up a lot of mainstream media are referencing poly market and and you know bringing up a shot of the Trump versus Biden chart or or odds um or there's another bet will Biden drop out will he be replaced by another candidate and and that's being referenced and this has happened well before this year every year the media tends to reference Betty markets for major events whether it's elections or big sporting events because they also understand that if you get thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people and millions of dollars betting on a thing it tends to become closer to Accurate not always and that's why there are professional sports bets out there because sometimes they're they're off and just the general public is way off but generally what happens is that as you get more money in people get sharper and like if if it's way off then someone will come along and bet like a ton of money on the the side to make a bunch of money and then it will readjust and and it keeps tending towards the main okay What is the growth potential of Polymarket? so poly Market clearly achieved product Market fit uh done it without a token super impressive also done it in a way that normies can use it this does not feel heavily crypto this doesn't feel like bad ux it's a beautiful site it's very userfriendly so it's great it's not just for crypto users although I think there is a question which we might answer later of how much of this is crypto natives right now versus how much of it is truly Global representation yet but let's just before we do that let's just talk a bit about the growth potential here so they did they've done over 600 million in total volume since their Inception they've done they just did a 100 million 110 million in volume in June what do you think their their growth potential is longterm when you look at the broader gambling industry as a whole it could hit 10x 100x uh THX I think is probably on the table it's insane how much money is in the gambling industry and how much people are betting like I'm literally in Vegas right now and there's betting all around me um I was an online poker player for 15 years I did sports betting a lot and there's tons and tons of sites there are more now than they ever were they keep popping up I think it's like hundreds of billions of dollars per year is like the global gambling industry 500 billion 500 billion is global gambling there you go and I can only imagine it's growing and it's going to keep growing possible share and Market size is enormous and it can definitely keep growing again as the gamification of everything tends to happen in the world so um whether I mean I don't think it's a great thing but it is what what is happening so I'm gonna I'm just going to slide by the uh moral side of this conversation and focus on a crypto ra that's winning for right now Onchain gambling vs traditional gambling uh the stat that stood out to me was online gambling is only 60 billion of that 500 billion annually and online gambling no surprise is the fastest growing sector within gambling and it's only 60 billion so you think about and poly Market has done 600 million so I think your you know your projections thousand X like 10,000x like those aren't crazy projections here obviously somebody would come in and copy poly market and go do the same thing that they are doing but this idea of onchain predictions Market I think is the future for sure and I think you you could even argue that they have a larger addressable Market because of the way that they're doing this on chain no kyc open source fully Global that's not how how you bet currently I mean you know well as a professional Gambler like there's so many uh roadblocks or barriers to get gambling that exist for I don't know I don't know what percent of the population has access to gambling but probably not a massive percent yeah it's um so like in the early 2000s there was very little regulation the internet was very new and online gambling was pretty new as well um so it was basically the wild west you can go and do whatever you want you could bet against uh others on whatever sport you could play online poker against anyone and then sort of around 20101 for the next 5 10 years up until now more and more countries started regulating uh online poker as well as sports betting and what happened was uh a lot of the sites started shutting down or they stopped allowing customers from certain countries and so you'll have companies that only allow customers from their own country and and if you're not in that country you can't use that website um which really kind of segregates and blocks a lot of liquidity you know if you're from a non- major country and and your country doesn't want you betting with other countries then it's very difficult to get action on a lot of these bets these um more exotic bets um maybe you can on like the Super Bowl or like the big soccer matches but you're going to struggle to bet on um is Taylor going to be pregnant or is the ETF going to be approved is that that was another big one that a lot of people were talking about it's a big pain if you're a company trying to offer gambling Services because of the regulation now I know we're side s stepping the moral thing but it is a good thing to have regulation because it is good to protect people and and stop people getting scammed and all that kind of stuff um but at the same time permissionless and free and open source is also something I truly believe in and I like the the idea of um poly Market for that reason itself I'm curious to know um as it scales and gets bigger and bigger and bigger are governments going to try and crack down on it somehow obviously because it's smart contract based you'll always be able to there'll always be a way around it but similar to like tornado cach for instance you know if it gets on a sanction list I'm not saying that it will but there are ways that governments can really disincentivize people to use protocols crypto protocols I don't think it will come to that I hope it doesn't and I think that it is creating something that is great and can scale Beyond almost anything else but there's definitely some serious challenges ahead um when we do look at scaling that that Lodge yeah that's a good point one question on everybody's mind is there isn't a token currently building a Will there be a token for Polymarket? crypto consumer app uh with this many users is basically unheard of without a token so I think that's one of that's one of the big things that captures our attention is oh my gosh this really has product Market that you know it's working because people really want to use it do you think there will be a token and if there is how can people listening capitalize on that potentially in the future it's a good question I think probably there will be um probably it'll be profitable for people to use the app and use it now but personally I hope that there's not being in crypto long enough you start to get jaded and like there's so many projects that launch a token and then it like it's their Achilles heel and they're always fighting against the current and it struggles to keep relevancy and it alienates people and they people get unhappy with the airdrop and like they've got product Market fit they have so much growth they don't need a token it's similar to like bass and farcaster like apps that people are just genuinely using because they love it and they found some sort of product Market fit token can usually only hurt you a lot of the reason that you'll see an app with product Market fit also launch a token is because they need to have a liquidity event for VCS or investors or they're looking to make a big bunch of money um but if the product is already making Revenue then you don't need a token I think and at least not anytime soon and I hope that they don't and they just keep growing because they've struck lightning in a bottle and and it seems to be sticking and I think that obviously there'll be like es and flows and after the election it'll probably drop off in in attention but I could see the popularity of the site 10 Xing but just between now and November due to the coverage it's getting on the election and um and other things and so but if there is a token and it is crypto and it's definitely not unlikely at all that there will be using the website placing some bets getting familiar with it um is probably the best way to um get yourself eligible for some sort of an air drop have you done any poly Market bets I've done a couple um my big one was I bet on the Super Bowl and it was again product Market fit I was sitting at home I was in a country that they didn't have easy access to sports betting at the time and I was like I would like to bet on the SP Super Bowl where do I go and poly Market was just simply the best choice and it was very quick and easy it just connected my wallet deposited some um I think it was usdc on polygon or or um I can't remember exactly what what the chain was or how worked but within a few minutes really I I had deposited and bet a significant amount of money on the Super Bowl and the team that I bet on one and it paid out and I withdrew my money it worked great uh I think I also bet on with the Bitcoin ETF be approved and I've thought about betting on a couple other things um but I haven't yet I've honestly wanted to bet on Trump for like years now but uh the opportunity cost of uh locking money up is for for such a long time is always on my mind um so I haven't but basically ever since GCR in like 2020 or 2021 was 2022 sorry was talking about how Trump's going to win the next election I was like you know what at like five to one odds this seems like a good bet and then obviously it's gotten worse over time the odds but um anyway I digress the other thing to mention quickly is that poly Market just raised another round they are super well funded they did a raise in March of $45 million with Peter this was led by Peter Teal's fund uh vitalic got in on this and many Is Polymarket an accurate measure of political sentiment? more respected leaders in the space and they had previously done another raise of $45 million so they've got $70 million in funding now so very strong treasury really well set up I want to try a little bit more about uh how most of this is political right now that is one thing that is capturing a lot of attention and what we saw was during the last debate their site actually crashed so they had so much traffic during the last that their site crashed which is wild and what we did was we took a look and I'm just going to pull up on screen here and show you these are all the current bets and broken down by betting volume so the highest bet is actually the most betting volume is that Joe Biden will win the election with 26 million on that Will trump win has 25 million um will Joe Biden win the Democratic nomination is still a bet with 22 million uh and so on so you can see most of their volume volume is political right now and one question that everyone is asking is is poly Market in accurate measure of political sentiment what do you think Zen yes I think it is because the way that betting markets generally work is that you can't usually look at a single site or Market in isolation you have to take the aggregate of all of them because if let's say poly Market had Biden to win at 80% and Trump to win at 20 which is clearly well off the the the Norms someone could hedge and go to Pinnacle or another major sports book or the local sports book or Casino or William Hill whatever it is and bet the other side who's offering you know a 6040 split towards Trump and be like you know what I'm going to bet 60% of here and then I'm going to go to poly market and bet the other side and lock up a win and because of that Arbitrage opportunity and and the global market generally being efficient especially when it comes to betting what you tend to see is one side's odds are basically the same as every other side there's usually maybe one or two% but it's usually not enough to beat the The Vig or the rake or the the percentage that the the fee the platform takes and we see that with everything we see that with the politics because with sports and you can you can check for yourself you go look at what odds poly Market has of trump winning the election or Biden dropping out and then you might be like oh there's you know body La musk made this tweet about how well crypto is full of um people that are maybe more likely to be Trump supporters Libertarians crypto supporters that kind of stuff um so of course Trump is going to have better odds but if you go and look at more more higher chance to win but if you go and look at all the other sites you'll see that they're basically the same within a couple of percent and it's because of that reason that um as soon as an opportunity exists where if poly Market was way off base or even significantly a bit off base there would be an Arbitrage opportunity and very very quickly it would get filled there probably is opportunities there because of how new it is and how while a lot of people know about it especially in crypto a lot of people also don't know about it there will probably be opportuni where you can find a bet and be like you know what I can lock up a few per free BET right now a risk-free bet by arbitraging on two sites but they they very quickly will close um I think that any significant sports book is is is going to be the same as all of them put together in aggregate interesting great Point okay last question is is predictions markets the new narrative in Is the prediction market the new narrative? the space and can we expect to see more of this I've got a tweet here from metallic saying that prediction markets and Community notes are becoming the two Flagship social epistemic Technologies of the 2020s both Tru saking and Democratic built around open public participation rather than pre-selected Elites and then another tweet from Yuga e saying prediction markets are the purest technological manifestation of liberal democracy they take free markets and Free Speech as inputs and output truth in an age when centralized control of information is a systemic risk prediction markets offer a way way of cutting through misleading narratives and viewing the unvarnished truth prediction markets are Freedom preserving technology that moves society's forward what are your thoughts Zen I I generally agree with all of that I think that they're a great thing and it's awesome to see uh I don't know if this will kick off like a prediction Market meta and we'll see a bunch more sites pop up necessarily I think it is we see some but I think that one is enough like one good prediction Market site that works trustless with good smart contracts that's all you need and it's generally better like if we look back at like what happened to uh online Sports Bing sites probably what will happen is we'll get more prediction markets popping up and they'll all like on the back end they'll all share the same smart contracts or feed and they'll just be different uis and so if you bet on one the odds will like automatically update across several of them and so it doesn't matter which one you're betting on it's basically betting with the same um odd pool and and and liquidity pool it's just different front ends because that's just the most efficient and so we might see we probably will see others pop up people try to replicate it um but all you really need is one that it works really well and we've definitely got that already and I think it's not going to slow down I think we see more and more and more of it I think more people will begin to use poly market and and understand it and adopt it and it's going to be great like it really is a really great way of democratizing information knowledge access um and and finances if people want to put their money where their off is awesome Zen thanks so much for joining us today thank you for having me as always in Hamster Kombat case you missed it here's what else happened in crypto news hamster combat the telegram based game has amassed 200 million users in three months rivaling the growth of Pokemon go and threads its YouTube channel reportedly gained over 10 million subscribers in a week surpassing if even Mr BEAST's subscriber growth rate now hamster combat is a tap to earn game on telegram built on the ton blockchain unlike polym Market which has no token hamster combat has Financial incentives for users so the question everyone is asking is this growth sustainable check out our episode from June 21st with the head of ecosystem from ton chain to learn more thanks for listening in everybody have a wicked awesome day thank you for listening to milk Road radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto if you like this episode share it and hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game then we'll leave a link to milk Road Pro as well your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto is risky so you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and we'll see you in the next one