Polymarket taps election statistician Nate Silver as advisor
Quick Take
- Polymarket has brought on well-regarded election statistician Nate Silver as an advisor, Axios reported on Tuesday.
- The platform is rapidly becoming the most popular blockchain-based prediction market, accounting for 80% of bets on the U.S. election.
- Silver says investors will increasingly leverage betting markets to assess the news.
Polymarket, rapidly becoming the most popular blockchain-based betting market, has brought on well-regarded statistician and election commentator Nate Silver as an advisor, Axios reported on Tuesday.
Prediction markets, once relegated to the realm of academic theory, are a way of aggregating knowledge among a crowd of users. Theoretically, and increasingly in practice, these users are incentivized to shed their biases by putting money behind their votes, sometimes called “skin in the game.”
Founded in 2020, Polymarket has become one of the most popular sites for betting on the U.S. elections. A poll set to close on Nov. 4, 2024, asking who will win the presidential election, has over $262 million riding on it. Users currently favor former President Donald Trump, whose rankings jumped to over 70% following the weekend assassination attempt. Axios reported that Polymarket sees more than 80% of global predictions made around U.S. elections.
Trump regularly posts his favorability figures on Polymarket via his social media platform Truth Social. Polymarket was one of the first places to suggest Trump would tap J.D. Vance as his running mate, which became official on Monday.
Polymarket, founded by native New Yorker Shayne Coplan, raised $70 million in venture capital, including from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. More than $400 million of trades have occurred on its platform in 2024 alone. However, it is not open to U.S. users due to strict Commodity Futures Trading Commission restrictions on “binary markets.”
Coplan has said in the past that he was influenced by Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises when developing Polymarket, which is a way of using markets to tap the wisdom of the crowd.
Silver, who was named one of the Time’s 100 most influential people after forecasting the outcomes of 49 states in the 2008 U.S. presidential elections on his FiveThirtyEight website, told Axios he expects the investor class to increasingly leverage betting markets to assess the news and better predict future outcomes.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
© 2024 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
