Crypto Bets for the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift Ramp Up; Bitcoin Tops $47K | Video

What’s the most fun or novel bet around the Super Bowl on Poly market right now? It’s either the color of the Gatorade shower or it’s gonna be Will Taylor Swift get proposed to at the Super Bowl which is only at like 8%. But hey, it’s a long shot 10 X if you’re right, who’s gonna win the Super Bowl? Stick around in just a few minutes to hear more about poly market and all those Taylor Swift bets that are swirling around. Welcome to first mover. I’m Jed Sani. You are on coindesk.com on this show. We take a look at all of your top news headlines and do some interviews with industry heavy hitters. Let’s get right into it and take a look at what’s going on in the news this morning. Bitcoin is headed towards $48,000.01 analyst says its breakout is fueled by a strong track record of gains around the Chinese New Year celebration. Marcus Teen, who is the head of research at Matrix Port and founder of 10 X. Research stated in part, quote during the last nine years, Bitcoin has been up every time time traders would have bought Bitcoin three days before and sold it 10 days after the start of the Chinese New Year. And quote, this comes as the coin desk 20 which is the gauge of the biggest cryptocurrencies added 3%. I must say every time Marcus Teen has been on the show, his predictions have been pretty spot on D I platform. Pendle has reached almost $1 billion in total value locked. According to DFI Lama, the surge in interest comes as the market looks for more opportunities for liquid retaking tokens. Pendle recently also added support for the B and B chain and Real world assets and hopping across the pond. Some crypto advocates are arguing the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct authority should rethink some of their ideas for regulating stablecoins. The organizations say the prospects treat stablecoin issuers unfairly and harm their ability to earn revenue. Currently, the FC A is reviewing responses to its proposals and will draft a handbook of rules for consultation better is on decentralized prediction platform. Poly market are putting their money where their mouths are when it comes to this year’s Super Bowl and the San Francisco 49ers are currently winning by a hair over those Kansas City chiefs joining us now to discuss is Harry Jones, head of global markets at Poly market. Harry, welcome to the show. Good morning. Thank you. All right, before we talk about the Super Bowl, we got to talk about what’s going on in the news this morning, I just zipped through those news headlines, most notably, Bitcoin seems to be on a little bit of a tear. What are you watching this morning? What’s exciting you, other than the Super Bowl, I will say the two exciting things about Bitcoin. The first from poly market is that Bitcoin has a 57% chance of hitting 50 K in February and then a 9% chance of an all time high in March. I wouldn’t say that stuff is uh particularly newsworthy, but the stuff that’s coming up that I’m looking at Ethereum ETF 48% chance of approval by the deadline may 31st and then 26% chance that Biden drops out of the presidential race. There’s a lot of rumors right now about um maybe they’re testing the ground, testing the waters for uh getting rid of Biden and the deom. I love a good prediction on this show. All of our, anyone who listens to this show knows that. And so this segment is one I’ve been looking forward to all week. We’re going to talk about the elections in just a minute, but everyone’s getting ready for the Super Bowl and more folks than usual because of a certain international superstar. So talk to us about what we’re seeing when it comes to Super Bowl bets on Poly market. So obviously, we have like the main Super Bowl bet which has the 49 is at 55% chance. And then the reason to be using Poly mark for this stuff is we have a lot more accurate odds than any other site because we don’t have these crazy fees. Uh We’re not middle manning these transactions. There’s a 0.4 cents spread uh on these events. So we have the most accurate odds by far now, we have hundreds of thousands of dollars of liquidity on these Super Bowl events. But we also have hundreds of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of liquidity on these Taylor Swift bets which sort of, uh surround the Super Bowl. So right now we have this, the Taylor Swift parley 27% chance that the Chiefs win. Kelsey gets a touchdown and he kisses Taylor Swift after the game. Uh And then there’s also like will Taylor Swift be shown five times 63%. Sean Taylor Swift is shown five times on the cameras. Uh If you search Taylor Swift on Poly market, you’ll, there’s literally a similar amount of Taylor Swift markets about the Super Bowl as there are Super Bowl markets themselves. But there’s a wide variety of both. Like you can bet on what color the gate R show is going to be at the end of the game right now. I’d be willing to put all my money on the Taylor Swift parley. I’m not a betting gal. I haven’t put all my money on it and it’s not financial advice. But I, I think there’s pretty good odds there. Uh Before we dive deeper into this harry, I think we need to back up a little bit. Just explain to us for the uninitiated how poly market works. So poly market lets you bet on the things you understand best. Like you can bet on politics. You can bet on current events, you can bet on pop culture, the things that you’re interested in, we have markets on and the way that the markets work is they’re all zero to a dollar. So if a market is trading at 45 cents, that means there’s a 45% chance that that’s going to happen. And then if you’re right and you buy each share is worth a dollar if you’re right. So if you buy a share for 45% or 45 cents, you get a dollar per share if you’re right. So for example, the Taylor Swift Parlay here, if you win the Taylor Swift Parley, it’s at 27% right now, you would, for X your money, it would go to a dollar. So there’s the trading aspect and then people use this for information as well. So on something like the Super Bowl, we have the most accurate Super Bowls. So people are tracking us all day long, getting the most up to date real time, accurate, unbiased odds on the Super Bowl. And then people also apply that to the elections. So we have the most accurate election odds on the internet. But you can actually see that on our website. Now, you can go to our election forecast page poly market.com/elections, uh where we have live unbiased forecasts of pretty much everything relevant to the election. Aram Deom 2024 president, you know Michelle Obama at 11% to be the d no way ahead of anyone else. You, there’s some interesting stuff that might surprise you on that. That is more accurate than any of the polls or tweets that you’re reading. How do you measure its accuracy? How do you uh prove or know that it’s more accurate than anything else that’s out there. The only way to verifiably prove it is for the event to happen or not. Uh And obviously, things that happen aren’t always what are expected to happen. But the simple thesis is that the free market is more efficient than poles and pundits who really have no incentive to tell the truth other than to sound intelligent. The difference in the free market is that people have a financial incentive to tell the truth. People only make money when they predict correctly. And then the the power of price discovery, the power of forecasting through that is that when you have a lot of people with different opinions who are aggregating this different information, who have different sources. When you bring all of these people together, you get an accurate price discovery for these things. So we accumulate all of this knowledge that’s already out there. And this knowledge is good knowledge like realclearpolitics like Nate Silver from 538. All these very smart people are pine on these things. And then poly market, traders aggregate all of this information and decide like how much weight to give to each opinion, to get an actual single price, which is a lot simpler than, you know, aggregating a million different things. Now, every time we talk about poly market, we have to bring this up. It’s not currently available in the United States. We’re talking about two events that are very big for Americans, the Super Bowl and the upcoming elections. Uh, talk to me a little bit about that are Americans, the ones who are betting on this. I know that they’re not allowed. So, like, what are the ins and outs of this and, and how is it so accurate if it’s not Americans, you don’t need Americans to be betting on? Uh, it doesn’t matter who’s betting on it because they’re pulling the same information. So if it’s Nate Silver, who’s an American who says, I’m pretty sure Trump will be president because of XYZ reasons. It’s the job of the market no matter where you are as, as long as it’s not in the restricted jurisdiction to, uh, use that information, formulate it into something interesting and make a trade based on that information. It wouldn’t be any different. If it was uh in America, it wouldn’t, the odds wouldn’t be different because these things are aggregate all information no matter where you are. Uh because you have a financial incentive, a European has equal financial incentive to get this right. Uh As an American, I will say, however, that a lot, a lot of Americans trust poly market to give them the most accurate odds on this stuff. So Trump, for example, the odds make him look good, but they’re the truth. So obviously, Trump is tweeting about poly market day in and day out because the odds make him look nice because he’s got a 52% chance of winning the election. He’s got something like a 93% chance of winning the Republican nomination. That’s just how it is. You know, Biden may not be as, as eager to share as Pono at Os because they don’t look so good for him. Is America on your road map. It’s not entirely up to us, but yes, we are exploring a lot of interesting novel avenues that would allow us to come back to America serve American customers. We want to have a product for Americans. It’s important to us. Uh And we hope that regulators will come around that having these real time unbiased forecasts on important global events is a societal benefit and we need it. Um There’s too much mis like there’s too much r rampant misinformation that you, there’s no cost to saying fake news. And there’s really only one way to solve it and that’s free market incentives to tell you verifiably whether or not someone is making stuff up. Tell me a little bit more about that regulatory hurdle from a regulation perspective. What needs to happen in the US for poly market to be available. Prediction markets need to be welcomed, especially political prediction markets. The beauty of poly market is that we will soon let anyone create markets on just about anything barring a few sort of like outlier event types. But America doesn’t have the sort of framework to allow us to do that at the moment. So until they have that, it is really nothing to talk about. Really. Are there any risks with introducing something like poly market into any? Are there any risks with creating these kinds of markets? The the financial risk of losing money if you’re wrong? But as I said, if you’re, if you’re knowledgeable about something, if you actually understand it better than the average person, you won’t lose money, you’ll make money on the aggregate on the whole. If your powers of forecasting, if your predictive abilities are better than the average, I think we all gathered that there is definitely a financial risk if you are betting on the wrong side. But just to wrap up this uh interview, let’s talk about the elections and dig into some of the predictions there. What’s the most standout or noteworthy prediction ahead of the election here in the US in November. The one everyone’s looking at right now is the Democratic nominee. So it’s really looking like the Republican nominee is a lock. People are looking at the VP nominee for Trump because they assume it’s just, it’s so clear that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. So people are looking at at least definite Christie Nome Nikki Haley Vivek as the top four sort of options for VP. But the crazy thing on the denom side is that people are speculating that Biden is by no means a shoe in to be the nominee. People are worried about his ability to beat Trump in the general election and the odds reflect that there’s a 73% chance that Biden wins, Dinon and an 11% chance that Michelle Obama wins. People are seriously considering the idea that if Biden were to be removed, if Biden were to be declared unfit, as people are saying by the Democratic Party, who would be the most popular choice to run against Biden and obviously leveraging all of the, the Obama popularity. Michelle is a strong pick for that and that’s why she says 11% even though she’s said nothing about running. Ok, here we’re gonna have to wrap it up but tell me who, who are your bets on to win the Super Bowl this weekend? Listen, I’m English. I don’t care too much about the Super Bowl. To be honest, my interests lie exclusively with how many times Taylor Swift is shown on the camera. I think it’s going to be a dozen plus. So I’m longing more than 12. If it, if the market is only on whether she’s shown five times and 63% of that seems incredibly low. She’s the main story of the night. Everything you see on tiktok is like the 49er must defeat Chiefs, the Chiefs Taylor Swift cabal. Uh All I gotta say about that is is if it’s more than 12, the dads brads and chads are gonna be upset. Exactly. It’s become a meme be bet four against Taylor Swift on poly market. Well, I’m always betting for Taylor Swift and it sounds like it sounds like you are too. I I just need to caveat again here, not financial advice. We’re just having a little bit of fun. Harry, thanks so much for joining the show this morning. Thank you. It’s time now to take a look at chart of the day. The chart of the day is presented by crypto.com, the leading crypto platform trusted by over 80 million users worldwide. Bitcoin is rising for 1/5 day, surpassing the $47,000 mark. Early on Friday, the largest crypto by market cap reached a one month high ahead of the Chinese New Year of the Dragon celebrating the start of what’s believed to be one of the luckiest periods according to the Chinese zodiac. Some analysts predict Bitcoin could rise to $50,000 over the weekend. Others have said it might even reach 53 to $55,000 before the Cryptocurrency having event in April. It’s time now for open forum, the third open forum segment of the week and we’ve done three because you have had so many great questions for us. If you watch first mover, you know that you could send us questions on social media and we will find the answers for you. We’ve been covering every aspect of NFTS all week and this is our last segment. Getting to the last of those questions. So let’s get right into it and take a look at our first question, Julia Kaley asked, what are the environmental impacts of NFTS in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions? Now, this question was asked a few times by people on X. So let’s dive right into it. Sarah Galis from Dap Radar helped us answer these questions. She told us that carbon emissions associated with NFTS are directly tied to the energy consumption of the Blockchain networks themselves said given that a considerable portion of the global energy mix is still derived from fossil fuels. The carbon footprint of creating buying and selling an NFT can be significant. Now that said, don’t freak out progress is being made to mitigate the environmental impact through the following initiatives. She mentioned Ethereum upgrade to the proof of stake consensus mechanism. This has significant reduced energy consumption on the Blockchain clear to scaling was also mentioned, both can process transactions more efficiently reducing the burden on the main Blockchain and its energy consumption and growing interest in alternative Blockchain technologies that are inherently more energy efficient. Like those using proof of stake or consensus mechanisms like proof of authority. Let’s take a look at our second question. Now, this is from Graal and Nelda. They ask, how do NFTS contribute to artists receiving fair compensation for their digital creations? This was also a question that a lot of folks asked about on X during our last two shows on February 7th and February 8th, we talked a little bit about royalties and unpacked this a little bit more. So if you’re still curious, check those first mover shows out, but let’s get into it. And FTS allow artists to sell their work directly to collectors or fans without the need for a traditional middleman. So that puts some of the money made from selling art back into the creator’s hand instead of in the hands of gallery houses or auction houses. This direct to consumer model increases profit margins like I just said, and gives artists more control over the pricing and distribution. Artists are also able to sell royalties that are attached to their NFTS so that every time their art is sold on the secondary market, they’re able to make a percentage of that sale that is vastly different than how the art market works. Another big part for artists is NFT culture, which includes collaborations and commissions. Oftentimes when artists are featuring on the same NFT marketplace, there are opportunities for them to collaborate with each other and participate in that community to further advance their projects and their names. And this is something that wasn’t really available to them in traditional art markets. Let’s take a look at the last question. Now it’s from Buckle Moses. They asked, how can I ensure the originality and uniqueness of an NFT artwork before purchasing it? Now, I think this is a question that’s often on people’s minds, especially in this industry. How do I know this thing is real? Sarah tells us that you should take a few steps before buying the first step is always confirm the artist’s identity. You can do this by checking their official social media profiles, their websites or even if their accounts are verified, some NFT marketplaces offer this, so they’ll have a, a blue check mark or some kind of verification stamp that allows you to know that uh some due diligence has been done. Many artists will link NFT collections right from their personal profile. So you can just, you know, link right out to their profiles, check them out, do some due diligence on your own. You should also ensure that you’re purchasing your NFT on a well known and reputable marketplace. And lastly, you can look at the history of ownership of that NFT Reputable marketplaces usually provide a detailed history of each item which includes the creation date, previous sales and ownership transfers. That’s it for open forum today. Please send us all of your questions. We love answering them for you. We want to make this industry as accessible as we can. And a big thank you to Sarah, your Galis from DAP Radar who helped us answer those questions? If you have any questions you want me to answer, just hit me up on X, send me ad M and I’ll be sure to get those in the show for you. That is a wrap for our show on a Friday. Thank you so much for watching First Mover as a note. We sometimes interviews for clarity and length. If you just can’t get enough of the crypto news, you can check out Coin desk.com this weekend while you’re getting ready for that Super Bowl. I’m Jen Sani. You’re watching First Mover and we’ll see you on Monday.