the first PayBox Hackathon starts Friday! 🚀

I’ve come to the realization that it’s not worth spending any more of my time trying to farm the Polymarket airdrop. That said, the market is still pricing in some value, with $POLY TGE odds remaining relatively healthy. I wanted to share my thoughts on why that might be and what the market is pricing in. The Endgame It shouldn't come as a surprise that Polymarket and Kalshi are looking to IPO before the US elections. After 2028, they could face significant legal scrutiny, especially at the state level, given that a substantial portion of their volume comes from sports betting. The Competition With sports and esports markets accounting for an increasingly large share of volume, the recent fee increases make competition even fiercer. These markets are also the easiest to provide liquidity to. This is similar to what happened with crypto exchanges, which launched tokens and offered fee discounts to attract and retain users. It also validates the idea that a token and a stock can coexist. The Lack of Goodwill and PMF The community has been very tolerant of Polymarket's buggy codebase and reliance on a third-party oracle despite all the money they've raised. Although the team has made some significant product improvements recently, I think we're at a point where Polymarket has a goodwill problem more than a product problem. They've teased a token airdrop multiple times over the past two years and still haven't delivered. The sad reality is that some projects can afford not to deliver on their promises. Pumpfun, for example, has already generated more revenue than it raised in funding. Polymarket isn't in the same position. I'm not saying there's no product-market fit, but it isn't strong enough yet to make the business as sustainable or scalable as it needs to be. The Bailout VCs have invested over $2B in Polymarket, and the company is now valued at $20B. At some point, they'll want to realize their profits. The path forward is supposedly an IPO, but the current metrics and growth trends are nowhere near enough to justify that valuation. It's also unclear whether they can raise more money, and there's little indication that things are improving beyond the recent product fixes. The platform has generated only around $100M in cumulative net revenue. In fact, if the VCs had put the money invested in Polymarket into US Treasuries instead, they could have earned more than the platform has generated in revenue. And since the beginning of the year, Polymarket hasn't been growing anywhere near as fast as you'd expect from one of the biggest players in the prediction market space. What's Being Priced In I think the market is pricing in a bailout in the form of a token that would not only give VCs an alternative way to exit or hedge their positions before an IPO, but also give Polymarket the exponential growth it needs to get there. It's obviously much easier to sell that story when the platform is growing like crazy. A token could give Polymarket that hockey-stick growth before going public. But what would that actually look like? The Ideal Scenario This part is obviously speculative, but I'd imagine something along these lines: > The international platform is separated from the US entity and placed under a nonprofit organization. >The token is announced, followed by the airdrop. > A second points program is announced, running for a year or longer. > Revenue-funded buybacks are introduced, with no long-term commitment to them, similar to what Pumpfun has done. Just look at the TVL and open interest that perp DEXs have attracted through points programs. Something like this could easily give Polymarket the hockey-stick growth it needs. Again, they wouldn't be doing this because they care about the community. They'd be doing it to make the stock and prediction market story easier to sell, giving users something back in exchange for extracting even more value in the future. The platform's fees are already very high. Which Way, Western Man? It's clear that Polymarket either isn't ready to go public with its plans or wants to keep its options open. We've seen Shayne talk vaguely about an on-chain asset without explaining what it might look like. Is he talking about an independent token, or something pegged to the stock? All of this comes at a heavy cost though, as more and more liquidity leaves the platform every day. Token teases have reached a point where they no longer seem to help revive volume. Instead, they're damaging the platform's reputation without having any meaningful impact on volume anymore. At some point in the near future, Polymarket won't be able to kick the can down the road any longer (unlike OpenSea). And it'll become increasingly obvious whether they're ever going to launch a token.