Polymarket Enjoys Boom in Five-Minute Crypto Bets

As Bloomberg News reported Sunday (March 15), users can now bet on where the price of bitcoin will be within five or 15 minutes.

In a little more than a month, such bets have become some of the busiest on the website, with up to $60 million changing hands each day, the report said, citing data from Dune Analytics.

Polymarket bets tracking whether bitcoin will be higher or lower than a certain price by the day’s end often take in less than $1 million per day. These volumes are small when compared to the tens of billions of dollars passing through cryptocurrency exchanges, but prediction market bettors are nonetheless hooked, the report said.

Jon Lourie, founder of prediction markets research firm Polyfactual, told Bloomberg that when he first started trading on Polymarket, election bets caught his attention. He switched his focus to sports markets after learning election contracts could take months to resolve, then turned to 15-minute crypto bets. The speed of these trades are “addictive,” he said.

“It’s like people just want to get to the resolution time faster and faster and faster,” Lourie said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see crazy things, like one-minute markets or something like that, in the near future.”

In other predictions market news, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said last week that it is seeking public comment on whether the regulator should amend or issue new regulations covering event contracts traded on these platforms.

CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig said in a news release that the commission wants to “promote responsible innovation in our derivatives markets.”

As noted here in January, prediction markets have been breaking into the mainstream and drawing interest from crypto, betting, finance and major institutions in spite of regulatory risks.

The markets have come under fire from critics due to issues related to trades on war, perceived similarities to sports betting and other wagering activity, and allegations of insider trading.

Meanwhile, Polymarket recently announced plans to develop a “sports integrity platform” to prevent, identify and report anomalous or suspicious activity on its market.

The company is working with software company Palantir Technologies and enterprise artificial intelligence company TWG AI to develop the new platform, “to apply world-class analytics and monitoring to sports markets while building tools that can help leagues and teams maintain confidence in the games themselves,” Polymarket Founder and CEO Shayne Coplan said in a news release.