Tens of thousands of election gamblers will see big payout
Tens of thousands of people who gambled on the outcome of the US presidential election are waiting to claim their share of around $450 million in payouts after Donald Trump was elected. However, some may have to wait to collect their winnings until January.
According to Reuters, US-based prediction betting exchange Kalshi saw around 28,000 people bet on a Kamala Harris victory, but 40,000 bet on a Trump win. An offshore crypto-powered site called Polymarket was also a significant platform for prediction betting on the election, but they did not reveal the number of bettors for each candidate. Combined, the two sites saw a pot of around $450 million as of Tuesday evening, according to data they released.
Polymarket bettors closed out betting early Wednesday morning when the Associated Press, Fox, and NBC had all called the electoral college for Trump.
Kalshi, on the other hand, will keep betting open until the presidential inauguration on January 20, meaning that bettors on the site face a long wait before receiving their winnings.
What is prediction betting?Prediction markets are specialized financial markets where participants bet on the outcome of specific events. Unlike traditional gambling, where people may bet on a single game or event, prediction markets aggregate information from a wide range of participants, turning individual bets into collective predictions about the likelihood of future events.
Samuel S.-H. Wang, a Princeton University neuroscience professor said to Reuters that prediction markets can “measure crowd wisdom where no hard data is available.”
Polymarket began to show signs that the mood was shifting toward Trump back in August when his position began to close on Harris’.
However, some are questioning the accuracy of these prediction markets after they seemed to show a Harris lead in Iowa as late as election day. On the other hand, it is clear that many people took to prediction betting platforms to invest in a Trump victory and will be rewarded as a result.
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