Prediction markets are redefining how society assesses uncertainty. In recent years, these markets have often proved uncannily accurate, and challenged more traditional metrics for assessing public sentiment such as polls. On Wednesday, Polymarket, one of the sector’s largest players, announced the Polymarket Institute, a new body dedicated to studying the ways in which prediction markets can forecast and discover information.
“We really want to establish this institute as a partnership between industry and academia to give people a lot of time to think about what the implications of this technology [are],” said Kai Brusch, Polymarket’s head of data.
The research initiative will operate as a branch of Polymarket and aims to provide the institutional rigor and infrastructure necessary to measure how prediction markets can function at scale. Polymarket will fully fund the initiative, though it declined to disclose its total investment toward the institute.
The announcement comes as Polymarket and its chief rival, Kalshi, make daily headlines for contracts that invite users to wager on everything from sports to interest rate cuts to elections. In the process, they’ve begun to upend the polling and survey industry, emerging as an alternative data source to traditional projection models. In July, Polymarket averaged 586,000 monthly active users, according to blockchain data provider Token Terminal. Major publications like The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo Finance have also partnered with the platform to feature its odds in their coverage.
