Compass Investments

– So, the platform has firmly established itself on the global stage. On June 6, Ilon Musk’s company X (ex-Twitter) announced Polymarket as its official partner in the prediction market. Thanks to this partnership, Web3 has its first native app fully adopted by a major platform.

This is a big deal, and perhaps no project can benefit from it more than Polygon, the blockchain that Polymarket has chosen as its home.

Polymarket’s rise wasn’t instantaneous. Its popularity has skyrocketed over the past year, especially during key political events. In 2024 alone, users bet over $8 billion on predictions related to elections, geopolitics, pop culture and macro trends. It wasn’t just the money bets that were attractive, but also the real-time reflection of public sentiment.

If you wanted to know who was likely to win the U.S. election, Polymarket often provided a clearer signal than most opinion polls. And that’s no accident.

When I asked Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal if Polygon played an active role in Polymarket’s success, his answer surprised me.

The best apps don’t need industry support, he said in an interview at Token2049 Dubai. If you ask me how much we had to contribute to make Polymarket a success, I would say less than 10% .

That’s not to say that Polygon was absent.

As Sandeep explained, we could only give them the option to have a few integration experts on hand to support them if they had any questions or concerns.

But the credit, Sandeep emphasized, goes entirely to the Polymarket team. {All apps succeed because of the tools available. Like I said, we are building vanilla infrastructure. All we can do is do our job well. The rest is up to the application.

According to Sandeep, the myth that blockchains elevate decentralized applications (dApps) is overrated. It’s more important to focus on the product – and that’s where Polymarket excels.

There was a point in the last bear cycle where we gave them investment at the right time, which allowed them to continue to develop…. but I wouldn’t want to take credit for their success.

Such humility is rare in the crypto world. Like the admiration he has for Polymarket founder Shane Coplan.

Shane himself as CEO. I even call him the Steve Jobs of crypto. He’s very focused, basically razor sharp on user experience.

That level of product focus explains why Polymarket has outperformed so many competitors and why it’s become the default betting destination for everything from the Trump-Biden race to the release of Taylor Swift’s next album.

And now, integrated into X, Polymarket will become not just a crypto platform, but a mainstream tool. Prediction markets will soon become the basis for everything from news interpretation to financial forecasts.

What’s the most important thing? Every time someone uses Polymarket, they are interacting with Polygon. Sandeep realizes the consequences.

I can’t imagine the volume this will bring to @0xPolygon, he wrote in X. This is a big win for all things Web3, the Web3 app is becoming the de facto X app.