Remember when Shayne Coplan used to roast traditional sportsbooks as “scams that rip off customers” and position Polymarket as the pure, neutral, peer-to-peer truth machine?
Yeah… about that.
Yesterday Bloomberg dropped the bomb: Polymarket is quietly building an in-house trading desk to trade against their own users. They’re hiring sports-betting sharp money to sit on the other side of your bets, provide “liquidity”, and basically turn themselves into the exact house they spent years dunking on.
This isn’t some minor tweak. This is the moment the mask slips.
Let’s list the damage, because it’s worse than most people realize:
1. Trust is fragile as hell in this space. One whiff of “the house is betting against me” and sentiment flips overnight. Look at what happened to Kalshi the moment they admitted the same thing – users screamed conflict of interest and started looking for exits. Polymarket thinks they’re too big to feel it. They’re wrong. 2. Every. Single. Corporation. Does. This. The second the revenue gets juicy, the “we’re building the future” narrative gets memory-holed and replaced with “how do we extract max value from the cattle?” It’s predictable, it’s boring, and it’s exactly why we keep building on-chain alternatives. 3. Hypocrisy level: Olympic gold. The founder literally called sportsbooks predatory for doing exactly what he’s now implementing. That sound you hear? It’s every early Polymarket evangelist deleting their “this changes everything” tweets from 2024. 4. And the best part – they just opened the door for every small, hungry competitor to eat their lunch.
Take Basis, for example (full disclosure: yeah, it’s ours, and it’s in public beta right now). We went the opposite direction on purpose: - Pure peer-vs-peer paramutuel pools. No house, no internal desk, no one taking the other side except other users. - Multiple ways to win: pick the right outcome, or just buy the event token and ride volume – you can literally profit even if you’re wrong on the result. - 100% LTV loops (yeah, you read that right) so you can leverage your position on both volume and outcome without ever touching centralized credit risk. - Anyone can create events instantly and earn from their audience – real creator economy, not just “pay us $10k to list your market”.
That’s the difference between a protocol that still believes users should eat first, and a company that just realized users are what’s for dinner.
Polymarket had the chance to stay neutral and own the “truth market” narrative forever. Instead they chose short-term juice and long-term reputational suicide.
Fine. More oxygen for the rest of us.
If you’re tired of platforms that start decentralized in spirit and end up as worse versions of the fiat casinos they claimed to replace – come test Basis. No house. No hidden desk. Just pure PvP, real leverage, and actual skin in the game.
The whale just showed its teeth. Time for the piranhas to feast.
See you in the pools. Basis beta is live.