Wrapping up 2022 and looking forward to 2023
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Amazing results in a turbulent, but vibrant, environment
Polkamarkets Labs came to life in 2021 with the creation of the team, the launch of the POLK token and the testnet deployment of the Polkamarkets Protocol.
Throughout 2022, in a turbulent macro-environment marked by the start of what could be a long bear market, the team kept building and pushing Polkamarkets within the Polkadot EVM ecosystem, and beyond.
In 2022, the Polkamarkets Protocol became the leading decentralized prediction markets protocol on Moonriver and Moonbeam and one of the Top 10 protocols in both blockchains, with over 4000 users creating and participating in over 1000 markets, generating over €2.5 million in trading volume.
We partnered with other companies in the ecosystem, who themselves kept building against the head winds, making POLK accessible on Solarflare, adding a fiat on-ramp capability with Transak, optimizing data indexing with SubQuery, and strengthening relationships across the Web 3 space.
The Polkamarkets community have earned over 300,000 POLK with the Protocol Incentives and Rewards scheme and participate daily in the Polkamarkets Discord, where they receive special roles in recognition of their contributions to the community and to the Protocol. Your support is immensely appreciated. We could not have done it without you, and together we will continue to do even more.
Giant leaps in Polkamarkets tech
The Polkamarkets Protocol started the year as an open-source two-contract protocol — one for prediction markets and another for market resolution — and has already expanded to a four-contract protocol with the addition of the Automated Achievements Protocol, which awards NFTs for trading and market creation activity, and the Market Curation Protocol, allowing POLK holders to upvote and downvote markets and provide a quality signal to dapps and traders alike.
In addition to the improvements made at the smart contract level, we also added several groundbreaking features to the Polkamarkets Web App, innovating on how prediction markets are used in the Web3 space: we made the first multi-chain app for prediction markets, integrated news directly within the context of prediction markets to give forecasters in-app access to relevant information, and created the Leaderboard feature, which, along with the User Profile feature, allow Forecasters, Oracles, Curators and Liquidity Providers to increase their level of participation, gain recognition and build clout for their abilities.
All of this capability is open-source, allowing other builders to quickly and easily integrate prediction markets in their own business or community. Our approach is that the Polkamarkets Protocol and Web App constitute a suite of building blocks on which more use cases can be developed, as put forward in the Developers Page and exemplified by the adoption of Polkamarkets by OpenDAO and the creation of SOSMarket on Ethereum, and by what we have done around the Football World Cup (read on).
Ending 2022 on a high with the IFL
In what was the culmination of a year of focused building, we joined forces with the Moonbeam Foundation and other projects in the ecosystem during the Illuminate/22 Cup, and launched the Illuminate Fantasy League, a fantasy predictions tournament focused on the World Cup. This project allowed us to test out the features of Polkamarkets Protocol V2, which contains a series of improvements that we had been working on for several months, most notably support for ERC-20 tokens, multiple outcomes, and initial outcome price setting.
The success of the IFL for Polkamarkets cannot be understated. Not only did it attract more users to Polkamarkets on Moonbeam than even before, with over 60% of all Illuminate/22 Cup participants playing in the fantasy league, it allowed our team to flex its engagement-building muscles in a brand new way and to experience first-hand how effective the technology is at allowing the deployment of a new use case, effectively increasing social media engagement by over 200%.
Whereas the usual activity on Polkamarkets Protocol is completely decentralized, with the IFL our team had the opportunity to centrally manage a fantasy predictions tournament: in addition to deploying the Protocol as-is, including features from the upcoming V2, we created a fantasy ERC-20 token, the $IFL token, which players could mint for free. We also created two new NFT collections to recognize players for their achievements in the IFL, and created a $1500 prize pool to reward the best players globally.
Looking forward to 2023 with V2 and more
Our goal at Polkamarkets Labs has always been to gamify participation in prediction markets, increase their adoption, and allow society to have a better outlook of the future. The foundations we have laid in 2022 will allow us to take yet another leap in 2023, as we bring more capability to the Polkamarkets Protocol with V2, and take prediction markets to more chains and more users, allowing a broader spectrum of people to foresee what’s ahead of us.
Thank you for your support so far. The ride continues. May we all have an amazing 2023.
About Polkamarkets
Polkamarkets is an Autonomous Prediction Market Protocol built for multi-chain information exchange and trading where users take positions on outcomes of real-world events–in decentralized and interoperable EVMs.
