Polymarket Building Social Market Infrastructure
Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken, on building the Nasdaq of crypto
The strategic point is that Polymarket is turning speculation into a public social feed, where a trade doubles as a statement of belief. Instead of posting an opinion, users buy yes or no shares on elections, sports, or cultural events, and the price instantly shows how the crowd is leaning. That makes the product feel less like a casino ticket and more like a live scoreboard for attention, conviction, and identity.
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Polymarket won early by making prediction markets feel consumer grade. Earlier crypto projects like Augur and Gnosis were built for developers, while Polymarket offered curated markets, instant fills, and USDC settlement, which made taking a position simple enough to become a habit and a shareable behavior.
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The social layer gets stronger when markets become media. Polymarket’s 2024 volume jumped from $73M in 2023 to about $9B, driven by election trading, and its odds are now useful enough that larger platforms want to plug into that liquidity and data rather than build their own market from scratch.
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This is why crypto exchanges care. The market is moving beyond a single app toward an infrastructure model, where exchanges, brokers, sportsbooks, and media companies distribute event contracts to their own audiences. The winner is the venue that becomes the default pool of liquidity everyone else routes into.
Going forward, prediction markets are likely to look more like a native format for internet participation, sitting somewhere between trading, betting, and posting. If Polymarket keeps pairing low friction trading with broad distribution, it can become not just a destination app, but core market infrastructure for how people express views with capital online.