When the presidential race was heated, the monthly volume of Polymarket reached 100 million dollars
Decentralized prediction platform Polymarket hit $100 million in monthly trading volume in June, as punters raised their stakes on how they think the US presidential election will turn out.
At the time of this writing, there are $203.3 million in bets on “Presidential Election Winner 2024,” which includes individual “yes” or “no” bets in 17 prediction markets.
US President Donald Trump is currently the favorite, with a 62% chance of winning the US election – a total of $24.7 million in bets and odds.
Second, current US President Joe Biden's $23.9 million is on his failure to run for a second term as president. After the performance of the June 28 presidential debate, those odds dropped from 34% to 21%.
Meanwhile, some political analysts have questioned whether Biden should drop out of the presidential race, raising the odds for Democrats Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama.
Other betting markets related to the election also collected millions of bets.
Biden's recent debate performance led to increases in “yes” bets on the “Biden drops out of the presidential race” and “Biden on July 4” markets, which were up 43% and 9%, respectively. Over $10 million in bets were placed on those markets.
There are also millions of dollars in bets that American rapper Kanye West and crypto skeptic Elizabeth Warren could win the presidency, but those markets show less than a 1% chance at this stage.
Polymarket, which operates on Ethereum sidechain Polygon, saw a transaction volume of $109.9 million in June – breaking the $100 million mark for the first time, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard.
Transaction volume between January and May hovered between $38.9 million and $63 million, a 620 percent increase over the previous five months (August-December 2023).
The number of monthly active traders also rose 115 percent to 29,266 in June.
RELATED: Bitcoin Soars As Betting Markets Back Trump In Debate With Biden
The total value locked in Polymarket is now $40.2 million, up nearly 69% over the past 30 days, Token Terminal data shows.
Cryptocurrency prices and UEFA European Football Championship 2024 markets have traded heavily on Polymarket.
Launched in June 2020, Polymarket recently raised $70 million and was led by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and the venture capital Founders Fund.
Yuga Kohler, head of engineering at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, says decentralized prediction markets are a way to cut through misleading narratives and look at the unchanging truth.
“Speculation markets are the liberating technologies that drive societies forward,” Kohler said in a June 30 X post.
Magazine: ‘Bitcoin Layer 2s' Are Not L2s at All: Why Does That Matter?
