The US presidential election has dominated much of 2024. At this point, the decentralized prediction market Polymarket has become popular among users and has been flooded with users.
Users flocked to prediction marketplace Polymarket this year to place bets on everything from presidential politics to the outcome of an HBO documentary. The decentralized prediction marketplace they flocked to was Polymarket.
While Polymarket has witnessed an influx of users, it has been one of the biggest successes for Polygon and its team on which it is based.
Nearly $2.4 billion was bet on the US presidential election, with Polygon seeing a surge in popularity due to low fees and high interest.
Despite being popular with mainstream users, Polymarket only brought in $27,000 in transaction fees for Polygon this year.
This has been attributed to the very low transaction fees on the network, with the average transaction fees being stated to be just $0.007.
Despite the success of Polymarket, Polygon’s token POL has not seen the expected price recovery. Analysts noted that Polymarket success and high user engagement did not directly lead to an increase in POL value.
Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron said the value of Polymarket is in bringing mainstream interest to blockchain, low transaction fees and easy accessibility, rather than generating revenue.
“I look at how Polymarket is built. I would never expect a lot of fees from Polymarket because it doesn't have a lot of composability like Uniswap. It's really just users coming to Polymarket. They make a transaction and then they stop. So until the user base gets really big, there's not going to be a lot of growth for Polygon.”
*This is not investment advice.