Polymarket’s $1 billion win – Is ‘Trump vs Harris’ solely responsible?

• Polymarket’s cumulative trading volume crossed $1 billion
• Weekly active users hiked by over 14x as well

It’s been a busy, largely fruitful year for the crypto-space and its community. Not only did Bitcoin and Ethereum Spot ETFs get approved, but political leaders across bipartisan lines are lining up to support cryptocurrencies too. Needless to say, some projects have profited from all this. Popular decentralized predictions platform Polymarket is one of them.

Users of Polymarket buy or sell shares using cryptos to bet on real-world events. Over the past 6 months, with the United States’ election cycle gaining steam, more and more people have been using Polymarket to place such bets.

In fact, just recently, it crossed a cumulative trading volume of over $1 billion on the charts, with the month of July alone recording figures of over $387 million.

That’s not all though. Monthly active traders rose from 29.4k in June to 44.5k in July, with Open Interest soaring to as high as $90 million too. Weekly active users grew ~14x from around 1,400 to 20,000+ as well.

Source: Dune Analytics

Now, most analysts believe that the ongoing election cycle in the U.S has something to do with this surge in interest. And, to their credit, there is good reason to expect so too, especially since the bets on ‘Who will become the next U.S President?’ constitute over 45% of Polymarket’s total trading volume.

However, according to ParaFi Capital, the single-largest investor in Polymarket, that doesn’t tell us the whole story. In a viral thread on X, the asset management firm claimed that,

“Of the almost 70,000 total addresses that have used Polymarket, only 42% made their first trade in an election-related market. The other 58%, or ~40,000 users, initially traded in non-election markets, including culture, business, science, and macro.”

Also,

“Of the 28,000+ users who made their first bet in an election-related market, 56% subsequently traded in a different market.”

Source: ParaFi Capital

While volumes associated with election-related markets soared over the last few months, so did volumes connected to other real-world events. The SEC’s approval timeline for a Spot Ethereum ETF is a case in point, with this episode spurring a $13 million hike in cumulative volume.

Here, other markets include the likes of betting on medal tallies in the Olympics, Taylor Swift’s engagement stats, and bets on the GPT-5’s possible launch date.

Simply put, while Polymarket’s utility and popularity has surged on the back of this election cycle, these political events alone have not been dictating the platform’s volumes over the last few months.

Here, it’s worth mentioning that on the back of the platform’s recent successes, the platform’s execs are considering different strategies, particularly those targeting monetization. Adding fees to the platform is one such idea that is being explored right now.