The hangover of the election of a new president for the United States has not yet been overcome, but several winners can already be identified. Along with Donald Trump, bitcoin (BTC) and the digital currency miners, Polymarket stands out, the cryptocurrency-based prediction market that has managed to position itself as one of the main sources of information.
Polymarket is a decentralized prediction marketplace where people can place bets with tokens on the outcome of future eventsas described in Criptopedia, the educational section of CriptoNoticias.
Polymarket itself is a decentralized betting platform that functions as a kind of stock exchange for future events, where users buy shares linked to specific questions, such as the outcome of an election or the price movement of a cryptocurrency. And in the recent electoral panorama of the United States it stood out for its ability to anticipate electoral results more accurately than traditional media.
Unlike polls, which showed a close race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Polymarket established before the election that the Republican candidate had a 67% chance of winning the race. And then, projected a 97% probability that Trump would win, before the media made their announcements.
This precision is due to the fact that its platform has a high volume of operations, as well as the ability to react quickly to new information.
In itself, the prediction market adds, in each action of its users, the information that many different participants have to derive data that transcends biases. Therefore, it is more accurate than surveys, especially because The market does not care about ideology, it only cares about whether the result is correct.
The above follows from the facts, in the sense that, based on the results, we can discover that in Polymarket there is a new way to detect the true feeling of tens of millions of Americans, more accurately and immediately, and without depending on traditional and outdated Internet polling agencies.
Trump won a comfortable victory, slapping most polls that had predicted a narrowing margin between both candidates in the popular vote, and that as the elections approached, almost all of them showed Harris ahead.
When polls get so wrong, “a key challenge in this race is exacerbated: the perceived lack of legitimacy of the polls,” he told media Al Jazeera Tina Fordham, of risk advisory firm Fordham Global Foresight. According to research, the predictions have often been correct, historically, but lately, they have been horribly wrong.
The reason why polls get it wrong, researchers say: it all comes down to who participates in these polls, how representative they are of the electorate, and how truthful their answers are. «Without accurate data, surveys mean nothing»they add.
Various American political analysts they had warned that the pollsters had not solved their problems, and therefore, underestimated Trump. Some of them, like Nate Silver of the New York Times wrote that “a key challenge that pollsters face is getting enough potential voters to respond to their surveys. Typically, reviews are collected over the phone, but this has become more difficult due to caller ID apps that help filter out calls considered spam.”
What makes Polymarket a reliable source of information?
Meltem Demirors, executive at the investment firm Coinshares, highlights the potential of markets to redefine the way in which people interact and value information. As distrust of traditional media continues to grow, marketplaces are emerging as critical sources that help navigate the complex contemporary information structure, and that’s where Polymarket comes in.
For the analyst, liquidity, market microstructure and the creation of new indicators are key issues to follow in the way the world is evolving and in that sense she believes that “markets are truth-telling machines.”
In that sense Demirors sees that Polymarket stands as a fundamental player in the future of information due to its unique ability to assess and translate data into reliable market signals, especially in a context where distrust of traditional media is on the rise.
One of the reasons why Polymarket is so important in the valuation of information. It happens because of the “alpha” actors, which refers to obtaining returns above the market. It is something that the analyst perceives as tangible. on Polymarket, where participants can take advantage of information privileged or unique perspectives. This in an environment of growing information uncertainty, where the ability to discern and monetize information becomes essential.
Another key aspect that Demirors highlights is liquidity, which in the case of Polymarket stands out compared to other markets such as Kalshi. According to what he says, the greater liquidity in Polymarket allows the signals generated to be stronger and more reliable, which maximizes the effectiveness of the predictions and investment decisions based on them. This underlines the importance of the microstructure of the market in the quality of the information that can be extracted from it.
In that sense, the vision of Meltem Demirors points to the advantages offered by marketsas we enter a world where distrust towards traditional sources of information increases, markets like Polymarket have the potential to redefine people’s relationship with information and offer a new path to navigate the information complexity of the future .
«Market wisdom is more accurate than any expert»
In an interview after the elections, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan highlighted how the cryptocurrency prediction market offered a more precise view of electoral results and in real time compared to traditional media.
While Polymarket indicated a victory for Trump in key states, the media presented an apparently close picture. Coplan stressed that the advantage of the platform he created lies in the “wisdom of the crowd,” where participants make informed decisions by risking your money, resulting in more accurate predictions than those of experts.
Coplan has no doubt the recent election has highlighted the potential of prediction markets to transform political analysis and coverage going forward. And in that sense, it is clear that yes, it is the answer to the question: will traditional surveys disappear? or perhaps there will be more and more people believing in them less as a source of accurate information.
