1confirmation Founder on Polymarket: Markets Are the Best Source of Truth
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
1confirmation Founder on Polymarket: Markets Are the Best Source of Truth
Participate, or shut up.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Nick Tomaino, Founder of 1confirmation
Translation: 0xjs@Jinse Finance
Prediction markets are exploding. June was Polymarket’s highest-volume month ever, with over $100 million in trading volume.
Participate or Shut Up
Today, it's hard to know what is true.
We know that the U.S. government frequently manipulates corporate media (see the CIA’s "Operation Mockingbird") and social media (see the Twitter Files) to spread lies for its own interests.
One major benefit of Musk taking over X is reduced censorship and top-down narrative control. But on X, anyone can easily fabricate their own false narratives, and algorithms tend to reward popularity over truth. Community Notes help address this to some extent, but X still has a long way to go in helping people distinguish truth from falsehood.
If you talk to young people today, they deeply feel this problem. They know that popular narratives created by corporate and social media are often untrue—but they don’t know how to tell what’s real and what’s fake. So they usually just default to following whatever is popular.
Markets Are the Best Source of Truth
A prediction market is an open marketplace where anyone with knowledge about a future outcome can contribute their insight via bets—and if they’re right, they earn money; if wrong, they lose money.
For example: “Will Joe Biden drop out of the 2024 U.S. presidential race?”
Talk is cheap. Experts can easily claim Biden will drop out, with no cost if they’re wrong. But in a prediction market, being wrong carries real financial consequences. Right now, you can buy YES shares in this market on Polymarket at $0.81 per share. If you buy YES, you’ll make a 23% profit if Biden drops out, but lose 100% if he stays in. The collective independent views of all participants currently imply an 81% chance that Biden will drop out.
The Biden dropout market on Polymarket has consistently been the best way to gauge Biden’s prospects in the 2024 election. As early as October 2023, the market indicated a 26% chance of Biden dropping out—while The New York Times and other corporate media outlets continued spreading lies about his mental state.
On June 27, 2024, during the debate, Polymarket once again served as a leading indicator of reality within the Democratic party. The market reacted immediately to Biden’s visibly impaired cognition, with the price of him dropping out nearly doubling.
Markets Are Superior But Not Perfect
If Biden ultimately doesn’t drop out despite an 81% probability, does that mean markets fail to provide truth? Not at all. Aggregated markets reflect current reality as seen by diverse participants across society. They don't always predict outcomes correctly. Market participants can be biased or irrational. And new information can emerge at any time, changing the odds.
The point is, markets offer more truth than a small group of pre-selected elites (old media) or profit-driven algorithms (new media), and will play a critical role in delivering more truth to the world in the coming years—especially at global scale, enabled by on-chain payment rails. In the crypto industry, we’ve long waited for a mainstream use case—one so powerful that people don’t even need to know it’s a crypto use case. Now, we have one that will play a significant role in shaping America’s future.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@NTmoney
