Polymarket Tutorial [Full Guide & Airdrop Strategy]

In this video, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about Polymarket. We're going to talk about what it is, we're going to talk about why you might want to use it, hint, you could potentially make money from this, and then I'm going to give you a quick walkthrough and my take on what this platform actually might end up being. Now, for starters, what actually is Polymarket? Basically, this is a betting platform where you can bet on pretty much anything. And when I say anything, I mean anything. And then if a lot of people decide that they want to actually place bets on that market, it actually creates a decent amount of liquidity. And some of these betting pools have millions and in some cases, billions of dollars worth that are being put on either side of the question. And so you can bet on anything from politics to sports to macroeconomics to pop culture and anything in between. Now, in terms of why you might want to actually use a platform like this, obviously, on the one hand, you can place bets. Now, this is, of course, a risky proposition, and you could lose money. So you have to, for starters, know what you're doing and understand that there is a full risk of losing money while interacting with the platform like this. But when we go through the tutorial in a couple of minutes, I'll show you a couple of ways that you can potentially make money from this and minimize the risk. Now, the other interesting thing about Polymarket is that they've raised a lot of money, $74 million, and they haven't actually dropped a token or gone public or anything like that. And there's been a lot of speculation that Polymarket could actually have an airdrop. And so that is one of the other main reasons why you might want to use this platform, experiment with it and interact with it is because if you do that, you might qualify for a Polymarket airdrop. And since they are such a massive platform with a huge amount of funding, and also a huge amount of just awareness, generally, even amongst non-crypto people, for example, during the US election, everybody was looking at Polymarket to see what the betting markets were saying. And so I think that if they actually decided to drop a token, A, they would probably reward people that actually use the platform, and B, the token could be interesting. So with that out of the way, we know basically what this platform is and why you might want to interact with it. Now, let's discuss how. For starters, before you can actually use this platform, you're going to need to deposit some funds onto the app. Now, you can create a profile to do this either by connecting a crypto wallet. So I've just connected my crypto wallet here using my browser wallet, MetaMask. But you actually don't need to use a crypto wallet for this. So for example, you could sign in and then just deposit money using one of these other methods with fiat currency. But since I'm a crypto DJ and I do everything on crypto rails, I just connected my wallet and then had to deposit USDC to the platform. Now, the way that this works is that you don't actually deposit it. You have to copy this wallet address, and then you need to make sure that you send USDC on the Polygon network, not Polygon ZKEVM. So copy the wallet address here. If you're doing this in your wallet, then open up wherever you have some USDC. And I'm going to send a little bit more USDC. And I'm just going to paste in the wallet address here and send the USDC. So let's go ahead and confirm this transaction and put another $20 on the platform. Okay, so that went through very quickly, took honestly less than I would say 15 seconds. And now I've got the money and it's ready to go. So for me, this is the easiest way to fund the platform. But for you, if you don't actually have a crypto wallet, and since it's on the Polygon network, you also need to have a small amount at least of POL tokens in order to pay for transaction fees. So if you don't have either of those things, you can try just the fiat funding method. Now, once you've created an account and funded it, you can track your portfolio by clicking this button right up here. As you can see, I have a couple of bets open right now. So I put one on the Magic versus the 76ers, lost that bet. So you can see when you lose a bet, it just goes to zero. But if you win a bet, then you need to come back to your portfolio to actually claim the winnings. But since I lost that bet, if I want to just clear it out of the profile, so I don't have to look at it, I still need to actually go here and click claim winnings. However, if I had one, this would also be where I collect those winnings. And when you do this, you sign a transaction in your crypto wallet. And the other bet that I have going is whether the current president of Korea is going to be ousted as president before the end of 2024. So I said no, I thought that he would still be the president by the end of this year. And as you can see, the odds change depending on the situation on the ground in Korea. So yeah, I'm just betting on completely random stuff here. But yeah, as we approach the end of the year, we get closer and closer to 2025, the likelihood that he gets ousted is going down. And so actually, my position is in profit, because it's seemingly closer and closer to me actually getting this one correct. Now, if you want to close a position or sell the shares that you've purchased on either a yes or no outcome, you can do so at any time. Even before this market resolves, I can actually sell the position that I've got right now and claim that 30% ROI. Otherwise, you can leave it open until it actually resolves. And that's what Polymarket calls a question actually being determined to be yes or no. And then you can claim your winnings or claim your losings and clear the position. So that is the way that all of these Polymarket bets work. They're always a yes or a no question. And you can see the prices respectively for yes and no, right in the app. So every time you choose a market that you want to bet on, whether it was the US elections, or will the price of Bitcoin hit a certain amount in December, whatever it is, it's always a yes or no question. And you either buy yes or buy no. Now, if we check out my profile right here, you can see that this is everything that I've done so far. I've traded on five markets or five questions. This is the total volume that I've traded and the total profit or loss. So not a whole lot. But I'm just trying to experiment with this in case they actually do an airdrop. And yeah, want to make sure that I get a couple of transactions in so you can track your progress and how you're doing in the profile section. Now, in terms of potential ways to farm this airdrop, while not completely risking all of your capital and fully gambling on coin tosses, there are some potential strategies that you could deploy to sort of increase your volume on this app without, you know, doing like a 50-50 bet. So when these different markets get closer and closer to resolving, so for example, with elections, let's say, as it becomes clear whether a certain candidate is going to win or not, you can actually buy those shares and have a much higher likelihood of your bet actually paying. So you still get the full volume for the amount that you trade. And you're not necessarily getting, let's say, like a coin toss risk. Of course, you're limiting your upside in terms of what you can potentially win by betting. And so it depends how you're using this. Are you using it to actually place bets and to just, you know, try to make money that way? Or are you using it to try and just generate volume and farm the airdrop? If it's the latter, then you can place bets on markets that are much more likely to go one way or the other. And so let's say if I put a bet on this right now, my potential upside is 12% if this guy actually wins the election in Croatia. My potential downside, of course, is still 100%. But since it's seeming very likely that he would win, then ideally the situation would be you place the bet, you get the payout of the 12% or whatever it is, but then you also get to track in your profile the total volume traded going up. So just as an example of how you could play something like this, let's look at this question right here or this market. And it's asking, what is the Fed interest rate decision going to be in December? This one is going to resolve on December 18th. And if we scroll down here, you can see that it's looking like the vast majority of people think that it's going to be a 25 basis point decrease in the Fed rate. And so what you could do if you wanted to get exposure to a market like this is to simply click buy yes. And when you're buying something that's close to a dollar per share, the closer it is to a dollar, the closer it is to actually being guaranteed to result that way. So let's say I'll just put a small amount on this market just to generate a little bit more volume and to increase the number of markets that I'm trading on. Now, beyond that, I'm not going to get into making recommendations on what people actually bet on. Of course, this is all super, super risky. As far as crypto goes, it's even potentially riskier than some stuff because the risk of zero is relatively high. So you have to, of course, be super careful with this. But yeah, just based on market sentiment and some research that I've done, it's seeming like this is one of the better airdrop targets in terms of an app that has a high profile that has solid funding and that might actually drop a token in the new year. And also, I should note that after the US election, the volumes on this platform have dropped off significantly. So it's still actually a good time, potentially even better than previously, to push a little bit of volume so that you can just make your wallet ready for any potential airdrop that might come through. So yeah, that's Polymarket. I do like the app. I do think it is worth checking out, experimenting with carefully, and of course, do your own research before putting any money into stuff like this. Hopefully, you found this little guide helpful, and have a great day.