Here is a list of things you can bet on right now. This year’s Super Bowl winner, sure. Winner of Survivors season 49, ok. But how many presents will Santa deliver this year? Number of tweets Elon Musk will send in the next 7 days? How much money Avatar: Fire and Ashes will it do at the checkout? Portugal’s next president? At Polymarket and Kalshi, if you can dream it, you can probably bet on it. Welcome to the age of the predictive market.
In this episode Vergecastwe try to find out where prediction markets came from and why they became so popular. BloombergJoe Weisenthal joins the show to follow the rise of Polymarket and Kalshi, explain their controversies and eventual adoption, and put these companies in their proper place in the economy. Above all, it helps us to find out if something new is really happening here, or if betting has been going on forever.
Read the article >