Waterfall

I wanted to share my thoughts on what I expect from Polymarket over the next few months. I’ll try to be as rational as possible and look at the bigger picture rather than letting the team’s poor comms around these plans influence my expectations. Some context Over the last few months, the Polymarket team has introduced several solid features like parlays and perps while making a good effort to improve the overall UX. I’d say they’ve turned Polymarket into a functioning, fairly complete product. Once the remaining issues are ironed out, I’d consider the core product more or less finished. However, I suspect the team has also come to the realization that Polymarket Intl has reached its peak and that its growth has plateaued. Given that volume has remained relatively stable since the introduction and subsequent increase in fees, I think they view the current stage of Polymarket Intl as a success. Where I think Polymarket is headed Now that Polymarket has hit the mainstream, I expect it to face increasing legal pressure as more countries ban the platform and pursue legal action against Blockratize. I believe the existing regulatory pressure already forces them to decentralize Polymarket Intl by introducing their own network — essentially an L2, which I’ll refer to as Polymarket Chain — along with a token, $POLY. (To state the obvious: @mustafap0ly leaving the company doesn’t change any of this, even if he was the one constantly teasing the airdrop.) The idea would be to separate Blockratize and Polymarket US from Polymarket Intl as much as possible. By moving the infrastructure and governance of Polymarket Intl onto a decentralized network, they could distance Blockratize from things like platform access (similar to how they never truly shut down Tornado Cash), as well as market creation, rules, and resolution. Those responsibilities would instead be pushed onto the network’s validators and $POLY stakers. I also expect Polymarket to put most of its energy and financial resources (ads, sponsorships) into the US market going forward. They now have regulatory clearance from the CFTC and significant market share to regain from Kalshi. In my view, that’s where they see the biggest opportunity. However, once they announce the network and replace the current resolver infrastructure, which is primarily controlled by UMA (one of the biggest attack vectors imo), with $POLY based governance, I expect them to introduce a Season 2 for perps and use ponzinomics to pump their metrics. I see this as the most obvious way to generate another period of hockey-stick growth in TVL and volume for Polymarket Intl. Since they’re eventually planning an IPO, having another strong growth phase before then would obviously be beneficial for them. Polymarket’s migration from Polygon Even at current rates, Polymarket is paying roughly $10M a year in gas fees to Polygon validators. That money doesn’t go to Polygon Labs. Polygon Labs also doesn’t have tens of millions of dollars to keep Polymarket on its network. They’ve recently laid off a significant number of employees, so the idea that they can indefinitely subsidize Polymarket to prevent the migration doesn’t make much sense. The fact that Polygon is more than capable of handling Polymarket’s current activity also doesn’t mean it makes financial sense for Polymarket to stay on Polygon. That’s why I believe a migration is inevitable. Final Thoughts I still think Polymarket will do an airdrop and migrate from Polygon this year. I hope @devjoshstevens manages to get Polymarket’s comms to a level that reflects the ambition of what they’re building. I’ve been fairly critical of Polymarket, but only because I genuinely want to see them succeed. Cheers.