David Yaffe-Bellany

There was about $12 billion in trading volume on Polymarket and Kalshi in December.

That's a 400% increase from the year before.

And look, granted, that's still a smaller user base than bets on traditional sportsbooks.

But the level of growth is pretty impressive.

So one recent example that got a lot of attention is a betting market on Polymarket about whether the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, would be removed from power.

Right, I saw that.

And some of the betting on that Maduro question actually raised new concerns about how these platforms operate.

Shortly before the US operation in Venezuela to remove Maduro, an anonymous better on Polymarket placed a large bet that Maduro would be removed from power, and then, of course, he was, and that trader made a big profit.

But the timing of that bet was so good

that it convinced a lot of people that this trader must have had some sort of advanced knowledge about the operation, that this must have been some kind of insider trading based on a government leak or somebody in government improperly using the site.

Yeah, to be clear, there was no evidence of that.

It was never proven.

But I think what we're seeing here is something that we've already seen in the realm of sports, which is when betting becomes super mainstream, there's an aura of suspicion that develops around everything.

People become convinced that things are rigged, that somebody's cheating to try to make money.

And now we're seeing that aura extend to all sorts of other things in the real world outside of sports.

And that's even bled into how the newsmakers themselves are operating.

There was an incident last fall where Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, which is the largest crypto company in the U.S., was doing an earnings call.

And at the same time, there was a betting market on both Kelshi and Polymarket on what words he would utter during that earnings call.

Maybe someday there'll be bets on what you'll say on the daily.

I mean, who knows?