Polymarket’s dumbest betting market
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G'day, Matt Bevan here, this is If You're Listening. We've had a lot of responses to our last couple of episodes about the Trump family's involvement in cryptocurrency and prediction markets. There's quite a lot of, how is this legal, and also a little bit of, so, the president's a capitalist, who cares? But for us here working on this show, one of the most interesting things is how many incredible stories there are related to these subjects. In particular, some extraordinary stories of people finding ways to manipulate prediction markets. It was genuinely very difficult for us to figure out which ones needed to go in the episode. We basically just decided to keep it to stories very specifically relevant to Trump and the war in Iran.
But there were just so many others. including one that supervising producer Cara Jensen-McKinnon has become particularly interested in. G'day, Cara.
Hello. I am very interested in this story.
Before we get to the story, Cara, have you ever done any insider trading?
Ah!
Not that I can think of and not that I'm willing to admit on an ABC podcast. How about you?
Well, no, I haven't done it, but the closest that I've come to it, not that I can admit to crimes on the podcast and haven't indeed done any, but a few years ago I remember a story came out that one of the online... sports betting agencies, had put out like a market on who was going to win the Triple J Hottest 100. Okay. I don't know, certainly don't know who wins the Hottest 100, but I know the people who collate the votes. Before the, you know, the broadcast begins, someone knows who won. And I was like, could I? No, I mean, obviously I won't. Could we? Yeah. But there was a slight moment of I appear to be adjacent to insider information. Yeah. And it was interesting. An all staff email went out here at the ABC saying, do not bet on the hottest 100, please.
Absolutely do not get involved in that at all. We do not like this. Please stay away from it. And I'm sure that everybody did. The realization I had is, you know, the amount of money that you could make on that kind of a market, betting against a bookmaker, you would have to risk your job over like a couple of hundred bucks that you could potentially win.
Yes, yes.
The prediction markets have changed that a lot where you can actually make some serious money and potentially get away with it. Yes. But this is a story that you've got for us. It isn't really insider trading. It's kind of about being able to place a bet on a thing that you can then just make happen yourself. Exactly, exactly.
This story is like a bit of a convergence. So the last two episodes we did, we looked at crypto markets and kind of these like pump and dump schemes in tokens, in cryptocurrency, which is basically where you put a bunch of money in, then you – create this kind of marketing frenzy around the company. People invest and then you basically cash out while it's peaking and then it crashes, the value crashes. And we also did an episode looking at prediction markets last week, specifically polymarket and how people are basically just cashing in on information that they already know.
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