The post Empire Newsletter: Bitcoin is a prediction market appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Today, enjoy the Empire newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter. TRUMPWIN Betting on the US election with prediction markets is the use case du jour for crypto. But instead of betting with USDC on Polymarket, powered by Polygon smart contracts, the same effect could very well be had by simply buying bitcoin — sometimes. The chart below plots Polymarket odds for Trump, Biden and Harris since the start of the year.  Trump is the line in red, Harris is in blue and Biden is in gray. The price of bitcoin is shown in the background by the orange area. In the middle is a red shaded area, a stretch of almost three months between mid-March and early June during which Trump’s odds on Polymarket matched the price growth of bitcoin almost exactly.  Polymarket bettors reckon Kamala Harris has 44.6% chances of winning in November, up from 39.9% one week ago The correlation began just after Trump and Biden swept Super Tuesday, all but confirming a rematch. A few days later, Trump called bitcoin an “additional form of currency” on CNBC — at the time, one of his most positive remarks about crypto to date.  Over the next six weeks, Trump’s Polymarket odds fell from 54% to as low as 42%, with Biden briefly taking the lead on the back of a series of positive polling. The price of bitcoin otherwise dropped more than 20%, from its all-time high above $73,700 to nearly $58,300.  Both Trump’s perceived chances and bitcoin’s price bounced at the same time in May — coinciding with Trump’s pro-crypto NFT gala — and regained a similar amount over the following month.  There’s also been correlation since Bitcoin 2024 last Saturday: Trump’s reading fell 59% before his speech to…

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Filed under: News - @ August 3, 2024 3:46 am