David Yaffe-Bellany

It came in 2020, just a few months into the COVID pandemic.

It was a time when a lot of information was swirling around.

There was fluctuating case numbers, emerging variants of the virus.

And a lot of people felt like it was hard to make sense of the confusing swirl of statistics.

So in Copeland's mind, prediction markets could help clarify this confusion.

It's not just a way for people to gamble on everything.

To him, polymarket is about creating a new source of information in the world.

It's all based on an idea that has long been studied in academia, discussed in financial circles, that crowdsourcing information could produce more accurate projections about the future than what any individual expert might come up with.

The idea here is that the source of truth and knowledge that prediction markets are offering could actually become a complement or even a replacement for things like traditional media.

It's crowdsourcing and it's also a financial market.

So people have skin in the game.

And the idea is that when people have money on the line, they tell the truth or they're incentivized to research their opinions as thoroughly as possible.

And if you can pull all of that together, then you've got a kind of amazing new source of information.

Yeah, this is a good question.

A lot of people don't fully understand it.

Prediction markets are essentially a series of yes or no questions.

So if you log on to the Polymarket website, you will see questions like, will the Iranian regime fall before 2027?

And if you want to bet on that, you buy what's known as an event contract.

Yeah.

And that's the yes option or the no option on any of these questions.