Polymarket Shakes Up U.S. Prediction Markets with Sports-Focused Waitlist Launch
Prediction market heavyweight Polymarket just dropped its U.S. waitlist app—and they're playing the sports angle first. No more begging offshore for action when you want to bet on Mahomes' next TD or the Knicks' inevitable collapse.
Why this matters: The platform's sneaky stateside rollout proves prediction markets are going mainstream—whether regulators like it or not. Wall Street's still trying to figure out how to short meme stocks while crypto degens are already pricing in Taylor Swift's next breakup.
Bottom line: Another brick in the wall of traditional finance's irrelevance. Polymarket's move proves the smart money doesn't wait for permission—it builds the damn permissionless casino.
Polymarket kept adding new users in November
In the past month, Polymarket almost repeated the record performance from October. The on-chain app brought in over 377K new accounts, after expanding by 400K new accounts in October.
In total, the app had 494K monthly active traders in the whole of October, expecting similar results in the coming months. Polymarket expanded rapidly after announcing its upcoming ICO. The biggest driver for its growing popularity was wallet and social media partnerships.
Daily volumes are also showing a trend of expansion, easily reaching a range of around $130M per day.
Polymarket remains a leading on-chain prediction market, although competition is growing with new platforms.
Polymarket launch almost resolves prediction pair
The launch of the app waiting list affected the prediction pair anticipating Polymarket’s launch in the USA.
Hours after the launch announcement, the pair was not yet resolved. The ‘yes’ token traded at $0.992, but trading was not closed. The outcome was disputed twice after a ‘yes’ proposal, and entered the final settlement process, which was predicted to take a few hours. The pair was highly active, reaching over $19M in total volumes.
The pair resolution is not considered valid, since Polymarket announced a waiting list launch. The discussion also recalled that Polymarket will consider a launch only after it starts accepting real money for trading resolution tokens. The pair may still resolve to ‘No’ based on these criteria, causing the ‘yes’ token to crash.
The prediction pair also relied on the UMA protocol consensus, which has previously handled contentious issues. Polymarket continues to have rare events when the prediction pair cannot be resolved clearly, leading to prolonged discussions and exposure to the UMA voting mechanism.
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