Posted August 22, 2024 at 5:16 pm EST.
Predictions market Polymarket, which has grown exponentially since the beginning of the year, is no longer the only game in town.
Drift Protocol, known for its perpetual futures trading platform, rolled out its own Solana-based predictions market competitor dubbed Bullish on Everything (BET), earlier this week, and has already experienced meaningful volumes for its events. For now, users can bet on just three events—who will become the next U.S. president, who will win the popular vote, and whether the Fed will cut interest rates by 50 basis points— but more are coming soon.
Drift co-founder Cindy Leow told Unchained in an interview that Solana is well-suited to have a predictions market built atop it.
“We’re looking to target a Solana-native audience, rather than vampire attack users from Polymarket,” Leow said, noting that Drift chose Solana to take advantage of what the popular blockchain was initially built and created for, i.e. large-scale trading. Leow says Drift’s goal was always to see if the Solana community would be receptive and interested in a predictions market like BET because of the roughly $5 billion in total value locked that already lives on the layer 1 blockchain. “People are used to holding their assets on a single chain where they don’t have to bridge around,” she noted.
Meanwhile, Polygon-based Polymarket has become the largest predictions market platform that’s built on crypto rails seeing almost $330 million in trading volume in August so far, up from just under $8 million a year ago and $54 million in January, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard created by Richard Chen. At the same time, almost 48,000 new accounts have been created so far in August, roughly six times the 8,476 that were created in all of January.
Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Read more: The US Presidential Election Isn’t the Only Reason for Polymarket’s Success
Polymarket users make bets by purchasing contracts that represent the probability of a given outcome. When the real-world outcome settles, the contracts either become worth $1 or $0 depending on whether the outcome corresponds with the user’s prediction.
In a similar vein, Drift Protocol is composed of smart contracts enabling users to trade derivative instruments. Specifically, Drift lets people swap perpetual futures, a type of derivative instrument that allows people to speculate on an asset’s future price without an expiration date, among other things. The launch of BET on Drift makes it so that people can now speculate on real-world events.
Toe Bautista, a research analyst for crypto market maker GSR, said in an email to Unchained that the possible integration between Drift’s prediction market and Solana Blinks is one that could be a catalyst for BET’s growth.
“Blinks,” short for blockchain links, are primitives that allow people to turn onchain actions on Solana such as swapping, voting, and donating into a URL link that can be embedded into the internet, such as social media websites.
“This would enable users to place bets on predictions markets directly through Twitter via Blinks…significantly enhancing composability by allowing capital allocation without leaving social applications,” Bautista said.
How BET Differs From Polymarket
In addition to being native to Solana, the overlap between Drift’s new prediction market and its origin as a derivatives trading platform gives BET some advantages overPolymarket. BET users can earn yield from the same assets dedicated to their bets on real-world outcomes, as well as place bets using different cryptocurrencies such as stablecoins, memecoins, or liquid staking tokens. By contrast, users on Polymarket can only place bets with USDC, and they are unable to earn a yield from their assets used to place bets.
“Polymarket has parlayed its first-mover advantage into a large liquidity lead that will likely continue to fuel its growth through election season,” Bautista said. “BET may see early success with Solana users given its position within the ecosystem, and may further benefit from various innovative features such as the ability to use many different cryptocurrencies, earn yield on BET trades, and engage in structured/hedged bets.”
Since Monday, the three prediction propositions live on Drift have already attracted $2.2 million in combined liquidity, which refers to the ease with which people can enter or exit their betting positions without substantially impacting the price of shares, data from Drift’s predictions platform shows.
Meanwhile, open interest, or the value of the total outstanding contracts, has reached about $292,000 for Drift’s three prediction events. The next proposition to be added will be whether the Democratic party will win both the election and the popular vote. Predictions about Solana, Formula 1 Racing, and other sports are coming soon, according to Drift’s platform.
“Trading has been pretty good – in line with expectations,” Leow said. On the first day of the launch, Drift’s predictions venue saw about $400,000 in trading volume, and upwards of $500,000 on the second day.
Drift began as a perpetual futures platform, allowing a number of entities, such as market makers, to deposit capital into its initial smart contracts to smooth trading among users. The protocol has since seen its total value locked grow to roughly $381 million, making it the seventh largest protocol built on Solana.
That large TVL represents a significant pool of money that could potentially be moved from Drift’s smart contracts dedicated to its trading platform and into Drift’s prediction markets smart contracts. “Given that we’re a [perpetuals] platform, a lot of market makers already integrated on Drift, so they’re porting over liquidity from the main contracts and into the prediction market contracts,” Leow said.
Similarities to Memecoins
Leow also drew a parallel between prediction markets and the memecoin phenomenon that’s seen tokens based on internet jokes reach multi-billion dollar valuations in short order. Leow said this suggests that both share a common behavioral trait: they capitalize on public attention and momentum.
While memecoins often lack formal structure, however, prediction markets offer a more organized approach to addressing speculative behaviors by delineating specific outcomes. “We see prediction markets as potentially a more streamlined and formalized approach to the same behaviors that the memecoin phenomenon came up with earlier this year,” Leow said.
Read more: Most Users Keep Losing Money on Pump.Fun, Despite the Protocol’s Record Profits
For example, crypto users often create memecoins related to real-world events, such as when Republican nominee Donald Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania in July. But while several of the memecoins were tied to the assassination attempt, such as TSHOOTER and TMC (an acronym of Trump’s shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks), Leow pointed out that they did not settle to any outcome nor pose a formalized question. They were “just an unbounded play on attention [where] you’re betting that this asset or this event is going to grow in attention and influence,” Leow said.
According to Leow, then, prediction markets are just memecoins that settle to an outcome, with another similarity being that when either a meme or a prediction event gets listed and gains attention, the likelihood of it continuing to do so also increases.
As you push towards an outcome [and] more attention goes toward the outcome, you create a self-perpetuating cycle,” Leow noted.
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