Polymarkets in Everything

Politics

Posters advertising Polymarket | Guerin Charles/ABACA/Newscom

A raid, for show: Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan, 26, had his Soho apartment raided yesterday morning by the feds.

For the uninitiated, Polymarket is a betting website that accurately predicted the outcome of the presidential election, contra many pollsters. Now, Coplan is the subject of a joint criminal investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as to whether he ran the site as an unlicensed commodities exchange.

The feds seized Coplan’s devices, which has led to truly excellent tweets. Hey, if they’re gonna do all this in public, so should he.

But many speculate that Polymarket is getting in trouble not because it did something terribly wrong—indeed, nobody was harmed or defrauded, bettors are all willing adults, who in some cases made out like bandits—but because it disrupts the old way of doing things and embarrasses those in power. “Financial markets are generally pretty efficient, and the evidence suggests that the same is true of prediction markets,” Eric Zitzewitz, economics professor at Dartmouth, told CNN. “There’s no virtue-signaling in an anonymous market when you’re betting.”

Polymarket works by allowing users to buy shares tied to a specific outcome. Each share then trades somewhere between $0 and $1; correct bets pay out a dollar, so you can earn a fair chunk of change (as one French trader did, betting that Donald Trump would win the election). It’s all run peer-to-peer on the blockchain, so there’s no bookie.

“Election betting is a murky legal area in the United States. In 2022, Polymarket agreed to stop offering its services to U.S.-based users after settling with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for operating without registration. The company paid a $1.4 million fine,” reports The New York Times. But since then, the fact that you can access Polymarket easily with a VPN is an open secret; there are tons of U.S. users, contra what the feds would like.

And that French trader, mentioned above? Many theorized he was trying to manipulate the odds. “How accurate could this platform’s predictive power be if one zealot can go all-in and distort the odds?” asked CNN, to which Coplan countered: “If someone takes a really big position on Trump…there is someone on the other side, a counterparty,” frequently doing the opposite. “When you see the odds on Polymarket, it is not a function of how much money was put on either side, it is a function of market price at that moment,” explained Coplan. “Some trade that someone made two weeks ago doesn’t have bearing on what the market price is right now.”

Polymarket not only called races pretty accurately, successfully crowdsourcing wisdom from those acting in their own self-interest, but also pretty early. A chart of comparisons:

The company’s spokesman said the raid on Coplan’s house was “obvious political retribution by the outgoing administration against Polymarket for providing a market that correctly called the 2024 presidential election.”

“It’s discouraging that the current administration would seek a last-ditch effort to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents,” wrote Coplan yesterday on X. “We are deeply committed to being non-partisan, and today is no different, but the incumbents should do some self-reflecting and recognize that taking a more pro-business, pro-startup approach may be what would have changed their fate this election. Polymarket has provided value to 10’s of millions of people this election cycle, while causing harm to nobody.”

“The election will pass, but Polymarket as a format of information for the masses, and a way of thinking about current events + the future, is unquestionably here to stay,” wrote Coplan last week on X before the election results had even come out. He was further vindicated a mere day later, once Trump’s victory became clear. We’ll see if the feds agree that his platform is here to stay.

Scenes from New York: Liberal darling Ezra Klein finally breaks the pundit omerta and admits what we all knew to be true: That cities governed by Democrats mostly suck, plagued by high cost of living and plenty of public disorder and inexcusable crime that, in some cases, doesn’t even get prosecuted. He even talks about the influx of illegal immigrants as something that’s been pissing folks off in places like New York. Is this the sign of a Democratic fever breaking, and them finally getting comfortable admitting obvious truths, or will he be taught a lesson?

QUICK HITS

  • I wish there had been more Gaetzkeeping, truth be told. He’s a bad pick:
  • Tulsi Gabbard, who years ago served as a Democratic representative in the House and has since made a name for herself as a Fox News regular/staunch war critic, will serve as the Director of National Intelligence. “I have a lot of questions,” Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters in response:
  • The word backlash is used so many times here:
  • The think tanks are fighting:
  • An excerpt: “MI assumes new immigrants generate ZERO additional corporate income tax revenues,” writes the Cato Institute’s David Bier. “I doubt MI’s own tax policy experts agree. Employees are hired because they produce more corporate income. Ultimately, MI excludes over $700 billion in revenue from its analysis.”
  • “Consumer prices rose 2.6% year-on-year in October overall and 3.3% excluding the volatile food and energy categories,” reports Bloomberg. “Both figures matched the median forecasts of economists in a Bloomberg survey. The figures underscore the slow and frustrating nature of the battle against inflation, which has often moved sideways—sometimes for months at a time—on its broader path down.”
  • The Trump-Musk relationship is fascinating:

The post Polymarkets in Everything appeared first on Reason.com.

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