Polkamarkets AMA Recap

03 Sep 202022:08

AMA

Polkamarkets AMA Recap

Cryptodiffer Team

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here:

Ricardo Marques (CEO & Co-Founder) @rsmarques
Francisco Lourenço (CMO & Co-Founder) @franlouco

Ricardo Marques

Hello! Thanks for having us here 🙂

Francisco Lourenço

Hey everyone 🙂 Thanks for the opportunity of being here

Cryptodiffer Team

Welcome, Ricardo and Francisco:) Thank you for taking your time today!
Our team has prepared 3 questions for you to start with!
First of all, let's start from the introduction:

Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community?

Ricardo Marques

I come from an engineering background and have been working with tech companies for the past 10 years.
Between corporate, contracting and tech startups I have launched a several ventures in the tech space.
I've been working with Prediction Markets for the past 5 years, one of the ventures I was leading was a gamified music stock market. Ever since I wanted to build something related in crypto space, partnered with Francisco and here we are 🙂

Francisco Lourenço

My background is in Management. I have more than 10 years experience in disrupting big companies' go-to market strategies, specializing in digital, E-commerce and social campaigns.
And I'm a vivid user on Prediction Markets, Gamification strategies on the enterprise level and a crypto and blockchain enthusiast.
Met Ricardo along the away and we kept in touch with a lot of discussions within the Prediction Markets industry. We want to change it!

Cryptodiffer Team

Perfect, thank you guys!
Let's move to the 2nd question:

Q2: Can you introduce PolkaMarkets to us?

Ricardo Marques

Polkamarkets is a DeFi platform for Prediction Markets, where users take positions on outcomes of real world events–in a decentralized and interoperable platform on Polkadot.
Users can monetise their forecasts of future outcomes and events, where your beliefs become assets with financial value traded openly on the market.
Buy & Sell shares of event outcomes, or even create your own events where others can take their own positions.

Francisco Lourenço

And just to add one more thing, we are not just a prediction market 😉
We will have important entertainment features. NFT-based gamification, live streaming integration for in-play positions on Esports & Sports, and daily crypto price markets.
Live chats and virtual events in online communities will also form a key entertainment value-add to our platform. 🚀

Cryptodiffer Team

Amazing, sounds really interesting! Thank you for an answer!
The last question from our team before we open the chat for community questions:

Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?

Francisco Lourenço

That's a really interesting question!
The time for prediction markets is here. It has never been more important for people to be able to forecast the future with accuracy, and the wisdom of the crowd is the best tool for this.
We wanted to start on building a strong community to ride along with us so we've relied on our incredible partners and incubators Moonrock Capital and Morning Star Ventures for their support and for helping to get the word out.
And right now, we're setting everything up for the IDO on the 24-Feb (in 8 days) 😱.
We launched an interest form with more than 10k pledgers and 100X+ over-subscribed, with over $80M in demand. Just huuuuuge!

We're in the middle of whitelisting that closes on 19-Feb at 5PM UTC. So don't wait for it to close!

Ricardo Marques

Thanks @franlouco! Now… Product-wise 😁
We're getting in touch with a lot of potential partners, from oracles to NFTs, Media to Gaming so stay tuned for big news.
We're aiming to launch our product by late February/beginning of March. For our MVP, we're focusing on Esports and daily crypto.
These are markets that resolve on a daily timeframes, which, combined with the entertainment features we're developing on top of it, will give our users an ultimate experience that will bring them back to Polkamarkets every day.
We don’t want our users to ever leave our platform!

Cryptodiffer Team

Thank you, guys! really enjoyed reading it!
It is time to move to the community questions part.

Cryptodiffer Community

NFT has been on a constant rise since last year and some big brands and names such as Louis Vuitton or Mark Cuban are already either involved or planning to get involved in the NFT space. What sort of approach does Polkamarkets have from this perspective - are you planning to approach some big names & backers behind your NFTs to boost the adoption?

Francisco Lourenço

NFTs are used for gamification on Polkamarkets, and to give users the ability to customise their profiles and have bragging rights. They will also earn users access to special markets and features. In terms of having major brands, we are going to announce something along those lines in the next few weeks when we announce another partnership. So stay tuned! But yes, we will be reaching out to major brands to sponsor certain markets.

Cryptodiffer Community

Do you have any mechanism for transferring to ethereum network compatibility so other projects can think of using your solutions?

Ricardo Marques

Yes, our MVP will be launched in the Ethereum network. We’re aiming for launch on the Polkadot ecosystem in Q2 2021

Cryptodiffer Community

LP are very important to your ecosystem. How will you encourage liquidity providers to be more inclined to provide liquidity to Polkamarkets?

Ricardo Marques

LPs earn 100% of the fees generated on Polkamarkets. Each time a user makes a forecast 0.3% of that trade in ETH / DOT go to a fee pool that is then distributed to the LPs who provided liquidity to that market.

We've studied platforms like Uniswap to see how they did their liquidity incentives, and we wanted to build in those strong incentives as well to provide liquidity. LPs play a very important role and we want as much liquidity on the platform as possible to enable users to make big forecasts with large positions

Cryptodiffer Community

1. Which project do you consider as your main competitors, and what are your strengths vs them?

2. In Q2 Polkamarkets will approach Sports Market: do you will consider E-sports only or also "traditional" sports?

Francisco Lourenço

1. All these platforms are unique - Augur and Gnosis were the pioneers in the market. Polymarket has liquidity providing, however all of these are simply financial products. By offering entertainment features we bring another reason to bring users to our platform and stand out by offering something more than just a cryptocurrency.

2. We'll have Esports on our MVP. We're aiming to Sports as well... UFC, NFL and more...

Cryptodiffer Community

WHY we hold $POLK For long term?

Ricardo Marques

Polkamarkets aims to become the standard for decentralised prediction markets. We want to be an entertainment platform as much as a forecasting platform.

Also, you’ll need to hold $POLK in order to create your own markets on Polkamarkets.

All of our efforts will be to gain dominant market share by buidling an engaging and fun to use platform, with great UI/UX. Just wait until you see more advance screens. We can share these right now though:

Cryptodiffer Community

How does the governance Polkamarkets structure work? How can the community contribute to the success of Polkamarkets? Does Polkamarkets plan to create an ecosystem, governance by the DAO community?

Francisco Lourenço

Governance features will be built in when our product is beyond the MVP stage and has a ton of testing and validation done. But that is our end goal, to have the governance on-chain and done by $POLK token holders. Short term, after our MVP we want to slowly open up market creation to $POLK holders. Later on we will start testing out DAO structures, but always with the $POLK token as a central coordination mechanism

Cryptodiffer Community

What is your project’s main target of Polkamarkets in this year 2021 ? and what your VISION and MISSION is in Polkamarkets Marketing?

Francisco Lourenço

As a main target we really want to launch the MVP within the timeline proposed, in Q1 2021.

Since the beginning of the conversations between me and @rsmarques on building something unique, the end goal is to solve problems such as lack of liquidity & markets, lack of traders and duplicated or confusing markets. We'll do this by incentivising liquidity providers and traders to facilitate and take large positions, while a system for curation and resolution ensures efficient and trustworthy markets.

Cryptodiffer Community

Hi Ricardo / Francisco, DeFi is uniquely positioned to disrupt monopolised financial systems. With this in mind, what impacts can you see Polkamarkets having on traditional markets/finance and what sort of volumes could we see compared to the low daily volume - less than 1M - we currently have in traditional prediction markets?

Ricardo Marques

So an important aspect of traditional finance is the ability to hedge. Prediction markets are perfect mechanisms for hedging against other positions a trader may have in the market, so that whatever happens, he's covered. Say if you are an oil futures trader on the CME, you can use a weather prediction market in the area where deliveries happen to ensure that a a hurricane in the Gulf Coast doesn't wreck your position on oil.

As for volumes, we incentivise LPs to provide liquidity by giving them fees for doing so, and we incentivise users to make forecasts and trade outcome shares by letting them mine $POLK for doing so.

On the entertainment side, we will build in live streams, live price feeds and charts, news aggregators and other features to keep people on the platform.

These all combined to encourage daily active us and high volumes

Cryptodiffer Community

Thank you for the opportunity to participate!

Q1: What is the toughest challenge you had to overcome so far?

Q2: Did you expect all this interest around Polkamarkets?

Ricardo Marques

1. Finding the right projects/investors to partner with has been the biggest challenge so far. From Oracles to NFTs, Media to Gaming there’s so many great projects out there and getting the ideal projects to team up with is tremendously important

2. We’re definitely overwhelmed with all the interest, but being backed by Moonrock and Morning Star Capital, the incubators of success projects such as Polkastarter and ExceedMe was a key point in our journey 🚀

Cryptodiffer Community

Polkamarkets yesterday announced a Partnership with the Kylin Network. Of course this Partnership really helped prove investors that Polkamarkets is a very impressive project. I would like to know what kind of partnership Polkamarkets expects to support ecosystems?

Francisco Lourenço

We're building something unique and we're aiming to have all sorts of partnerships that add value to the ecosystem. Oracles, NFTs, Media, Gaming. In the upcoming weeks you'll see some of them 😀

Cryptodiffer Community

1.) Having been in the prediction line, working with prediction markets, what were the limitations and setbacks encountered in launching into the crypto space and how were they overcome?

2.)What makes polkamarkets unique in its entirety among others like them and what new innovations should users expect from the brand that will make them stand out?

Ricardo Marques

I’ll answer both in the same paragraph since they’re related 🙂 we studied extensively our competitors out there, and we believe the main reason these projects haven't become big references in the prediction market space is the fact that most of their markets resolve in monthly/yearly timeframes, giving users no reason to come back to the platform after placing their predictions.

By providing entertainment features and markets that resolve daily, such as daily crypto/esports we create a space for users to come to Polkamarkets on a daily basis.

Cryptodiffer Community

Hello,Polkamarkets is described as a cross-chain gamified prediction market (I see a similarity with a futures-based Dex) - sounds very interesting and your campaign about predicting things is very engaging, Evidently from the AMA there's more to follow - so my question is what's chains are you going to be compatible with / or will work with other than Ethereum? Will a stable coin be implemented into the ecosystem?

Ricardo Marques

We’re launching our MVP on the Ethereum network and integrating Polkadot for Q2. We definitely intend to have stable coins as trading assets in our roadmap, more details on that soon 🚀

Cryptodiffer Community

Protecting users/member data and privacy has become a problem that many companies/projects must face in their development.
So can you explain a bit about Polkamarkets Security?

Francisco Lourenço

We are compliant with GDPR 👍🏻

Cryptodiffer Community

Are you planning to add news monitoring and analytics functionality to the Polkamarkets platform? What features of Polkamarkets aim to improve the user experience in the prediction market participation?

Ricardo Marques

We still can’t disclose many details but definitely, those are the sort of entertainment features that we want to integrate in Polkamarkets and make it a unique platform

Cryptodiffer Community

It's brilliant enough to have a perfect concept with outstanding use-cases but how do you intend to strategically expand Polkamarkets reach?

As regards monetizing forecast of future outcomes and events, is there a system put in place to regulate and maintain authenticity?

Francisco Lourenço

Yes there is. We're just getting started with the launch of our MVP in Q1 2021. The hype is real and authentic in a way that we're building something that people needed and that the market needed. We have so much on the pipeline and we're always looking to what the community has to say to bring more value to it. All inputs are welcome 👍🏻

Cryptodiffer Community

Will Polkamarkets likely be the DeFi prediction market that can take over other fiat betting companies (e.g. Unibet) in the long term future?

Ricardo Marques

As an information exchange and DeFi platform, Polkamarkets is a place where people come to learn more about the future. You can say that accurate and crowd-validated forecasts are our main product. It's our goal to make forecasting fun and entertaining. People like to make predictions and see if they are right!

Cryptodiffer Community

Poor user experience has been a major issue of most DeFi projects, how's user experience like on Polkamarkets? What efforts are you making in ensuring the platform is smooth and beautiful to use as this would help gain user and traction?

Ricardo Marques

Definitely agree with you on that one. A large number of DeFi projects are focusing mostly on being a financial product. We want to standout by being an entertainment platform.

In order to achieve that we have a great team of UX/UI Designers working with us to make sure we delieve the best possible experience for everyone who lands in our platform!

Cryptodiffer Community

1) Is it possible to get partnerships with NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL? Would be REALLY cool! 🚀🔥🚀🔥 That would explode the network

1) Any specific details about farming? Any rough estimates for the APY? There are a lot of farming platforms and projects how do Polkamarkets stand out from other farming projects?

Francisco Lourenço

Partnerships with major sports leagues are something we are looking into. We are planning on leveraging our partnerships in the NFT space to open doors for us. We can't reveal anything concrete yet, but it's in the cards.

The way we do farming is different, it's based on platform usage. A 1/3 of the fees generated by trades on the prediction markets is used to auto-buy $POLK on dexes. This newly purchased $POLK is then given as an additional reward to the LPs and users on the platform.

Ricardo Marques

The Polkadot ecosystem has seen a tremendous growth over 2020. On top of that, the Ethereum network, as of today, has scalability problems such as transaction time / gas fee costs.

Polkadot seemed like the natural choice to be the architecture for Polkamarkets

Cryptodiffer Team

Perfect. thank you for your time, amazing answers today.
Appreciate this!
Thank you to everyone who took part!

Francisco Lourenço

Thanks, everyone for your questions!

Ricardo Marques

Great questions indeed, thanks everyone for your interest in Polkamarkets. Stay tuned! 🚀

Francisco Lourenço

Our Official Project Sources:

Website - https://www.polkamarkets.com
Twitter - https://twitter.com/polkamarkets
Medium - https://polkamarkets.medium.com
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/polkamarkets
Telegram - https://t.me/polkamarkets
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/polkamarkets_announcements