Why Prediction Market Adoption Is Here
Introduction
At the intersection of DeFi and information exchange lies the Prediction Market: an area where traders can leverage their knowledge of the past, present and future to forecast specific, real world outcomes. The ability to profit off of information exchange and modeling has formed the basis for much of modern capital markets. With the rise of DeFi, traders are finding yield through decentralised exchange, lending, farming and providing liquidity for others to use. No current player in the market combines DeFi with prediction markets, until now.
Main Features of Polkamarkets
Take positions on events in real time in Esports, Sports, Crypto Prices, Politics, & More.
- Livestreams and Video Feeds of Live Events
- Virtual Events, Promotions and Giveaways
- Liquidity Provisioning and Rewards for LPs
- Use $POLK to create/curate Markets
- Use $POLK to resolve oracle disputes
- Mine $POLK by providing liquidity to Polkamarkets
- Yield Farm $POLK
Timing is Everything.
We believe we are on the cusp of prediction market mass adoption. The ability to make forecasts about an uncertain future, hedge your positions in the financial markets, and genuinely peer beyond the horizon of time to the best of our collective ability has never been more important. In a world where anything is possible, seeing the future will become more and more valuable with each forecast and trade on Polkamarkets.
Our mission is to bring to the market the best forecasting tool available, and to gather as many forecasters to the same place in order to refine our predictions of the future. There are many challenges ahead, and many lessons we have learned from the past.
Many will ask, how will you succeed where others have failed? Fair question. The idea of the prediction market is not new, and success cases demonstrating their power go back as far as twenty years. Centralised prediction markets proved too powerful for the powers-that-be at that time, when for example InTrade correctly predicted the results of multiple presidential elections before being shut down. Their demise was due not to their lack of success, far from it; their demise was due to having physical, centralised systems that could be shut down.
Fast forward more than a decade, and you have the idea of prediction markets springing up again, but this time on the decentralised Internet powered by blockchain. These early attempts at creating a high-volume, liquid prediction market mostly failed because of the lack of scalability at the time, but also for other reasons: poor UI/UX, too steep of a learning curve, and little to no incentive for daily active use. They could not be shut down (since they ran on blockchain) but no one really cared.
It’s time to forecast a better future.
Polkamarkets aims to solve the low usage & volume problems by incentivising liquidity providers and traders to facilitate & take large positions, while a system for curation and resolution ensures efficient and trustworthy markets. The platform will also leverage tried and tested DeFi incentives such as liquidity mining and yield farming to incentivise daily active use.
As an “Entertainment DeFi Platform’’, Polkamarkets will offer Sports and Esports daily markets with live feeds of events alongside forecasting. Users will be able to watch their favorite teams play while making live, in-play forecasts about the game’s outcome. Live odds and automated market makers will dynamically adjust odds based on users’ forecasts on the markets. As users trade outcome fractions, they will mine $POLK tokens that they can later use to open their own prediction markets on Polkamarkets.
Daily crypto price markets & Over/Unders will also be available, with integrated real-time price feeds and charts for traders and professional trading desks to hedge the market.
On Politics and Information markets, our News Aggregator function will allow press and other media outlets to add links to news articles supporting either side of the trade. This way forecasters can make informed decisions about their trades, and researchers can become more informed about the likelihood of a contentious real world event actually happening or not.
Leveraging DeFi When Others Did Not
In the early days of decentralised exchange, we saw platforms like EtherDelta struggle to serve their users in a burgeoning new market. Then Uniswap came along and completely dominated. How did they do that? Amazing UI/UX, great branding, and they made money for liquidity providers and users (among other things). Plus, it’s actually fun to trade on Uniswap!
Polkamarkets wants to apply that model to decentralised prediction markets. No current player is able to combine the benefits of DeFi and liquidity provisioning, yield farming and token mining to prediction markets.
Liquidity Providers on Polkamarkets will mine $POLK for providing liquidity, and additionally earn the trading fees generated by the platform. This way we are aligning incentives for both forecasters and LPs to come to Polkamarkets to make forecasts, provide liquidity, and earn rewards.
POLK Tokenomics, Distribution, Usage & Growing the Protocol Adoption
We´ve setup a designed distribution & use of POLK based on our perspective of how to create adoption for the protocol
- Liquidity Fund (Ops) — General Operations, Exchanges Liquidity, Payments, and acquisitions of relevant software — these (either in $POLK or liquidated currency) work as direct revenue for the project to implement in the previous sections
- Marketing, Ops & Rewards — Marketing, Payments, Partners, General Operations, and Protocol Rewards — these (either in $POLK or liquidated currency) work as direct revenue for the project to implement in the previous sections
- Foundational Tokens — Direct Revenue for POLKAMARKET OU — TBD where to use
About Polkamarkets
Polkamarkets is an Autonomous Prediction Market Protocol built for multi-chain information exchange and trading where users take positions on outcomes of real-world events–in decentralized and interoperable EVMs.
