Trump's Odds of Victory Hit All-Time High on Polymarket After Shooting

Former U.S. president Donald Trump's probability of retaking the White House jumped to an all-time high Saturday after he was injured from a shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania, according to traders on Polymarket.

A Secret Service spokesman said the Republican presidential candidate was "safe" after the shooting, according to The New York Times. A suspected gunman was killed, and a spectator died as well, the newspaper said.

Photos and video footage of a defiant Trump with blood on his face pumping his fist in the air circulated on social media, following two weeks in which the national conversation had focused on the frailty and gaffes of his opponent, incumbent President Joe Biden.

"Yes" shares in Polymarket's contract on whether Trump will win the presidency climbed ten cents after the incident, to 70 cents, meaning the market now sees a 70% chance he will prevail in November. Each share pays out $1 if the prediction comes true, and zero if not. Bets are programmed into a smart contract on the Polygon blockchain and settled in USDC, a stablecoin, or cryptocurrency that trades 1:1 for dollars.

"PoliFi" meme tokens named after Trump also surged after the shooting. MAGA, for example, was up 34% on a 24-hour basis to $8.38, according to CoinGecko data, and the satirical TREMP had climbed 67% to $0.6471.

BODEN, a joke asset named after Biden, slipped about 15% over 24 hours to $0.0333115. These meme coins have become a sort of "de facto betting market on the election," as one proponent described them this year, although unlike prediction markets, PoliFi tokens do not pay anything out to holders if the associated candidate wins.

As noted by the writer Noah Kumin in the Mars Review of Books, the shooting also inspired (if that's the right word for it) a crop of new meme coins, many of them in poor taste, on the Solana token creation site Pump.fun. "Resurrection of Trump" (ticker: ROT) and "Hero Trump" (HERO) were two relatively innocuous examples.

The CoinDesk 20 index, a proxy for the overall cryptocurrency market, is up 3.31% on a 24-hour basis. Bitcoin, the oldest and largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is up 3.26% to $59,735.17.

Trump has expressed wholehearted support for crypto on the campaign trail – he is set to speak at a bitcoin conference in Nashville this month – and the Republican platform vows to halt the Biden administration's "crackdown" on the industry.

Polymarket, founded four years ago by Shayne Coplan, has seen boffo trading volumes in 2024 amid enthusiasm for political betting ahead of the U.S. election. The U.S. presidential winner contract has a total of $252 million in bets placed, a record for the company and for all crypto-based prediction markets, if not all prediction markets.

PredictIt, a more traditional betting site where wagers are settled in fiat, showed a similar trend, with Trump shares climbing from 59 cents before the shooting to 66 cents before leveling off at 65 cents.

Prediction markets are often called a more reliable gauge of sentiment and superior method of forecasting than polls or pundits because the people making predictions are putting money on the line, and are therefore incentivized to do thorough research and express their honest opinions.

UPDATE (July 14, 2024, 01:55 UTC): Adds BODEN token price, links and background.

UPDATE (July 14, 2024, 02:36 UTC): Adds detail about newly minted meme coins.