Interview with: Polkamarkets

Tell us briefly why we should all love Polkamarkets!

Currently, existing prediction markets suffer from key problems such as lack of liquidity & markets, lack of traders, and duplicate or confusing markets. Polkamarkets aims to solve these problems by incentivising liquidity providers and traders to facilitate & take large positions, while a system for curation and resolution ensures efficient and trustworthy markets.

The ability to profit off of information exchange and modeling has formed the basis for much of modern capital markets. With the rise of Decentralised Finance (DeFi), traders are finding yield through decentralised exchange, lending, farming and providing liquidity for others to use. No current player in the market provides all of this together.

Essentially you’ll love us in a sense that we’re disrupting the industry of Predictions Markets, bringing something unique, fresh and with an amazing UX/UI design.

What was the main motivation behind the launch of Polkamarkets?

Prediction Markets are the next big wave of adoption for Blockchain, and it’s clear to see why. Uncertainty is at all time highs, and people genuinely want to see the future, in order to prepare.

Decentralized prediction markets like Polkamarkets can serve a wide range of users and use cases. And we are beginning to see the boom in interest in prediction markets where users can take positions on future outcomes. Everyone is interested in knowing what will happen next. Knowledge is power, and the future belongs to those who can see it most accurately, and act. We want to bring to market the most powerful and entertaining forecasting tool that anyone has ever seen.

The blockchain industry is extremely saturated, what competitive advantage differentiates Polkamarkets from other prediction market platforms?

Platforms such as Augur and Gnosis are unique as they were the pioneers in the market. Polymarket has liquidity providing, however all of these are simply financial products. By offering entertainment features we have another reason to bring users to our platform and stand out by offering something more than just a cryptocurrency.

None of those competitors are really focused on entertainment value or community building, or building in DeFi features. These are critical to us for gaining users and traction. Additionally, we are doubling and tripling down on user experience and making the platform beautiful and easy to use.

We want to make prediction markets fun and gamified! We are combining DeFi and liquidity incentives to the Prediction Markets industry like no one used before. We’ll have live streaming integration for in-play markets on Esports and crypto price markets. Live chats and virtual events in online communities. A Visual Portfolio on user’s forecasts, Live Feeds for Esports & Events. NFT Gamification to generate badges for achievements. NFTs for access to exclusive markets and finally Easter Egg NFTs for engagement and participation.

How do you plan to incentivize liquidity providers to join your platform?

We actually launched an article regarding this question, you can read and learn more here.

Essentially $POLK token is used to incentivize liquidity provision, and coordinate Liquidity Providers (LPs) by employing an skin-in-the-game model.

Liquidity providers are the sole beneficiaries of all the trading fees generated by the Polkamarkets platform. This was on purpose. We wanted to allow LPs to earn yield on their liquidity, since how else would we be able to attract them to our platform? There are innumerable DeFi protocols out there where LPs can earn yield. Therefore, in order to attract their liquidity, we decided to give them the trading fees made from all forecasts on Polkamarkets.

The largest LPs will also earn NFT badges and special access to virtual events once those functions are live. In summary, Polkamarkets wants to keep our liquidity provision function open to all LPs who wish to provide less than $10,000 USD in total liquidity. Those LPs that wish to provide more (and thus earn more of the overall fee pool) will need to hold $POLK tokens. We wanted to ensure that our early supporters and token holders always have access to the highest tiers of liquidity provision and fee earning potential. This is a critical use-case for $POLK tokens and ensures a balanced equilibrium between openness and rewarding our early supporters.

What advantages are there by building such a product on Polkadot as opposed to Ethereum?

When it comes to scalability, we’ve all experienced the scalability problems in the ETH network, such as transaction time / gas fee costs. On top of that, given the tremendous growth of the Polkadot ecosystem, it seemed like the natural choice to be the underlying architecture for our platform.

Polkadot also allows for custom blockchains, and creating parachains to your specification. This feature will allow us to eventually build a parachain specifically tailored to prediction market needs.

Additionally, there are an incredible amount of business development opportunities in the Polkadot space, and we are very excited to explore those. In the past weeks, we’ve been in touch with a lot Projects in this particular space

What will be the purpose of the $POLK token with the ecosystem?

We have $POLK as a utility token. We use the token to coordinate incentives to make network effects to solve the problems that Augur and others had regarding low volumes, low liquidity, etc. We’re using it as a Buy back and Yield Farming strategies as well. Mining for users and liquidity providers earn $POLK for making forecasts and providing liquidity. And create incentives for high daily active users and for users to come back to the platform on a daily basis.

We wanted to build an ecosystem behind the project with our own native token for Network effects for building a brand, Ability to Bootstrap and Curation later on.

Governance features will be built in when our product is beyond the MVP stage and has a ton of testing and validation done. But that is our end goal, to have the governance on-chain and done by $POLK token holders. Short term, after our MVP we want to slowly open up market creation to $POLK holders. Later on we will start testing out DAO structures, but always with the $POLK token as a central coordination mechanism.

Every company has short, medium and long term goals. What can we expect to see from Polkamarkets?

In the short-term it’s definitely to launch our MVP. I think it’s really important to get the technology out there in order to test it with early beta testers and to get feedback from the community. Beyond that of course being a Polkadot based system we want to migrate from Ethereum to Polkadot. In terms of prediction markets we want to have Esports markets and cryptocurrency markets that settle in shorter time frames like on daily time frames and on weekly time frames for example. Then beyond that we want to add an entertainment rich set of features for example livestreams, integrated trading charts and virtual events, such and of course nft gamification for our most loyal users.

We are an entertainment and defi based prediction Market that’s really all about the community so we really want to get our community involved and we’re really excited to bring Community Building features such as that on to our platform.

Currently there’s no clear winner in the prediction markets space on the blockchain side, so our long-term goal of course is to become the winner and become the reference for the space and bring a super-powerful forecasting tool to the market.