Republican candidate Donald Trump’s odds of winning the 2024 election surged on Polymarket after the first debate.
There’s a growing market sentiment on the platform that President Biden will either not be the Democratic nominee or drop out of the race.
Blockchain bettors were skeptical of President Biden’s performance in the first debate of the 2024 election cycle, pushing up former President Trump’s odds of winning the November election to as high as 67%.
A contract asking bettors to declare the outcome of the 2024 election currently has close to $188 million on the line, with around $23 million on Trump and $21 million on Biden.
Polymarket said it suffered a brief downtime as the debate started because of a large wave of traffic.
A growing skepticism about Biden’s chances of going the distance to election day has been reinforced by looking at market sentiment.
According to Polymarket, there’s a less than 70% chance that Biden will be the Democrat’s nominee, with California governor Gavin Newsom hitting a high of 17% and Michelle Obama up to 7%.
Another contract asking if Biden would drop out of the presidential race surged during the debate to 43%.
Meanwhile, PoliFi token traders pushed both major tokens representing Trump and Biden well into the red.
According to CoinGecko data, the MAGA token, which trades under the ticker TRUMP, is down 12.5%, while the BODEN token is down 34%. TREMP is also down 10%. The DJT token, in the headlines recently for its apparent connection to Barron Trump, is down 5%.
Crypto was not mentioned during this debate despite it becoming a Republican campaign issue. A Polymarket contract asking if Trump will mention crypto or bitcoin pegged it as unlikely, topping out at 6%.
Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not invited to this debate; however, a special broadcast on X in which he responded to the questions asked during the Trump-Biden debate got 5.6 million views on the social media.