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The 2024 U.S. election season sparked a genuine frenzy around prediction markets, with Polymarket emerging as the undisputed epicenter of betting activity. Bloomberg incorporated Polymarket on its terminal. Reports emerged that the Trump campaign was actively monitoring Polymarket odds in real-time. Around $3.7B in election contracts were traded across the market throughout the course of the year.
This success triggered a gold rush, with entrepreneurs and developers rushing to spin up their prediction market clones to capture even a fraction of the excitement. Yet despite this deluge of new entrants, none managed to gain meaningful traction against the dominant platform.
Of the $162M total value locked (TVL) across prediction markets tracked by DefiLlama today, Polymarket still single-handedly commands ~85%. However, its TVL has declined from the peaks seen during the election cycle, when daily active wallets reached 50,000, daily transactions surpassed 500,000, and trading volume hit $350M on November 6th alone. With such remarkable metrics, many watching questioned whether Polymarket could sustain this momentum after the ballots were counted.
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