Wintermute Launches Prediction Market Ahead of U.S. Elections

Crypto trading platform Wintermute is building a predictions market with the U.S. election just seven weeks away. The company is leveraging Chaos Labs’ Edge Proofs Oracle for its new product called OutcomeMarket, which will start with betting markets for TRUMP and HARRIS tokens.

Wintermute plans to roll out the betting market next week across multiple networks, including base layer Ethereum and scaling layers Base and Arbitrum. Edge, an oracle solution, will provide "tamper-proof" data feeds.

> "Unlike existing prediction markets confined to a single chain, the multi-chain approach allows direct participation from users’ native blockchain ecosystems without the need for cumbersome asset bridging," the company stated. Wintermute also indicated that there may be future DeFi integrations, such as offering users yield or leverage on their positions.

Prediction markets, long restricted to academic economic study, are gaining traction in the crypto industry. Bettors are using platforms like Polymarket to wager on future events, and the crowd-sourced data is now regularly cited by mainstream media.

> "There has been significant interest from both centralized and decentralized trading venues to list such prediction market contracts, but no one had developed them in a permissionless manner and without imposing minting or transaction fees," said Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute.

Wintermute is collaborating with trading platforms Bebop, WOO, and Backpack as market makers for the initial ERC-20 compatible token markets and aims to expand further. Unlike so-called PoliFi memecoins like BODEN or TREMP, Wintermute's trading pools would be backed by liquidity that pays out when one side wins.

Editor's note (Sept. 17, 2024): Updates headline to clarify TRUMP and HARRIS are tokens.