gamblers wager on Olympics and Taylor Swift’s engagement odds

Popular cryptocurrency gambling site Polymarket has become one of the best places to bet on the 2024 Paris Olympics, with punters placing millions of dollars on questions like “Who will win the most medals at the Paris Olympics?” and “Who will win the most gold?”

The Olympics category is a new category that offers cryptocurrency bettors the opportunity to bet on which country will win in a number of sports events, including men’s basketball, men’s tennis, women’s soccer, and women’s basketball.

Bettors are betting on which countries will win medals for various sports, and even on specific performances by athletes like American swimmer Katie Ledecky. The majority of crypto gamblers—about 80% at the time of writing—believe Ledecky is on track to win two gold medals. The cost of taking the bet? A few cents to vote yes, and up to a dollar to vote no for the odds.

So far, millions of dollars worth of digital assets have been deposited into the gambling platform to make a prediction on the Paris Olympics. Polymarket operates on both Ethereum and the Polygon blockchain. This year alone, more than $400 million has been wagered on Polymarket, and betting volumes are expected to grow.

In fact, Polymarket has witnessed explosive growth in betting volumes related to the November 2024 presidential race. For several weeks, crypto bettors have been speculating on the possibility of President Joe Biden dropping out of the upcoming race. On Polymarket, the contest on this line of questioning opened as early as September 21, 2023, and few expected the possibility of Biden conceding his exit to come true. However, after a mediocre debate performance and an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, the odds snowballed significantly, and Polymarket saw a sudden spike in betting.

While election polls are notoriously inaccurate, prediction markets have been successful—at least in this case—in predicting Biden’s eventual exit from the 2024 presidential race. In fact, prediction markets sometimes outperform opinion polls and expert opinions, and some argue that they benefit from comparative accuracy because gamblers have a financial stake in seeking the most accurate information.

For the Olympics, more than $1.8 million was bet on which country would win the most medals. At the top, the US is behind with more than a quarter of a million in crypto, followed by China, Japan, the UK and France. The rankings for gold are not much different, with more than $239,000 in crypto bets on the US, more than $259,000 on China and more than $300,000 in crypto bets on Japan.

Other Polymarket predictions were for lower-stakes questions, such as how many tweets Elon Musk will send in a given week and the likelihood that football player Travis Kelce will propose to billionaire singer Taylor Swift this year. The latter question has until Dec. 31, 2024, for the prediction market to automatically determine a “no” answer.