Culture
Memecoins, prediction markets, NFTs, games and the people driving them.
Kalshi prices a Democratic sweep at a record 70%. Did a fake pollster move the odds?
Two days before the November 3 vote, Kalshi's market priced Democrats winning both chambers at 70%, up more than 9 points in a month. Ten days earlier, Kalshi had to explain why a fabricated pollster barely moved its election markets.
Bored Apes are down 96% from their record. Which NFT blue chip fell least?
Most of the famous NFT collections now sit about 90% to 99% below their peak floor prices in ETH, and the marketplaces are closing. CryptoPunks are the exception, at about 76% down.
Pump.fun added Monad and TON and is pushing perps. So why is PUMP down 25% since October 12?
The Solana memecoin app now lets users trade Monad and TON tokens from one USDC balance and is pushing leveraged perps. Its PUMP token kept sliding, and daily revenue fell about 35% in 11 days.
Polymarket repays $3.9 million after a hacked vendor script hits it for the second time
On October 29, a compromised outside script on polymarket.com used logged-in sessions to sell positions and drain 726 wallets. Polymarket paused trading, repaid 689 of them in full within a day, and is covering pause losses too. It was the second vendor script attack in four months.
Kalshi raises $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation. Can it outrun the states?
The prediction market says it now runs at more than $1 trillion in annualized volume and wants to sell perps, indices and compute markets. Two days earlier, its federal regulator sued Utah to stop the state from shutting such markets down.
Polymarket US quits sports contracts in Michigan. Open bets must close by November 25
After losing two bids in federal court, Polymarket's US arm agreed to stop selling new sports event contracts to Michigan residents. It is the fourth big platform, after Coinbase, Robinhood and Kalshi, that the state has halted.
Kalshi signed the NBA and S&P Dow Jones, then capped under-21 deposits at $2,500 a month
In five days, Kalshi became the NBA's preferred prediction market, agreed to build event-contract indexes with S&P Dow Jones Indices, launched sector data contracts and put a monthly deposit cap on its youngest traders. Then it raised $1 billion.
Blur switches off blur.io on November 12. Its token is down 99.8% from the peak
The NFT marketplace that boomed in 2023 is retiring its website and stopping new Blend loans, while its contracts stay live on Ethereum. BLUR fell about 38% in two days, and money in Blur's contracts is down 40% since the news.
Pudgy Penguins' owner shuts Abstract after losing tens of millions. Exit by December 15
Igloo says two years of funding its consumer blockchain cost it tens of millions of dollars without finding product-market fit. Users must bridge out by December 15 or lose access, and the company is going back to the penguins.