- Polymarket emerged as a big winner in the presidential contest.
- French trader made a whopping bet Trump would win.
- Prediction markets come into their own with breakthrough year.
Donald Trump wasn’t the only winner on Tuesday.
Théo, the French trader who wagered big time on Trump winning a second term on Polymarket, is poised to rake in at least $48.5 million on his audacious wager, according to data on the platform.
With Trump sealing an Electoral College victory Wednesday morning, Theó's wager may go down as one of the richest paydays in political betting ever.
And that result is also a triumph for Polymarket itself.
The crypto-fuelled prediction market came out of nowhere this year to let punters make all manner of bets on what-ifs.
But the biggest query on the site was “presidential election winner 2024,” and shares were sold for Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris, and even musician Kanye West winning the contest.
$3.5 billion market
By the time voters went to the polls on Tuesday, the market topped $3.5 billion in total cumulative volume, according to data from Dune Analytics.
Théo, whose surname is not known, is also set to pocket $19.4 million if Trump wins the popular vote. And the Republican nominee is leading on that score with 51% of the vote.
He also has several open bets on Harris’s loss and Republican victories in other races.
somewhere in paris a man named theo is absolutely murdering a plate of escargots and some foie gras and washing it down with a nice bordeaux
— nic carter (@nic__carter) November 6, 2024
Polymarket’s performance has been one of the surprises of this election cycle.
Even as mainstream finance players such as Bloomberg featured its prediction market on the presidential contest on their own platforms, experts were sceptical about Polymarket’s utility as an effective prediction device.
The issue was that whales such as Theó could plough so much liquidity into the market that they skewed the odds.
For instance, in October Polymarket showed Trump with a 32 percentage-point lead over Harris even though traditional polls said the race was far tighter.
It turned out that Polymarket, while it may have exaggerated the margin of victory, was right on target on the result.
And so was Theó.
Liam Kelly is DL News Berlin-based DeFi Correspondent. Got a tip? Email at liam@dlnews.com.