Crypto's Bet on Election Betting Expands to Solana

Solana-based crypto trading platform Drift is adding prediction markets to its product lineup, placing a bet on Polymarket-style election betting, but with a few twists.

The BET service will allow traders to bet on binary outcomes (Will Trump win the election? Will Harris win the popular vote?) using cryptocurrencies, much like Polymarket has done atop Ethereum and Polygon.

Drift's rendition, though, will be more ingrained in decentralized finance (DeFi). Users will be able to make their picks using dozens of cryptos as collateral, instead of just USDC, and earn yield on that collateral ahead of the event's outcome, Drift co-founder Cindy Leow said. Users can also hedge their event-based forecasts with structured trades on the price action of various cryptos.

Prediction markets are proving to be a breakout crypto use case this election cycle, with pundits in the mainstream media often citing Polymarket-derived statistics in their reporting. Traders who pour hundreds of millions of dollars into whatever outcome they think most likely are powering these markets.

Drift is primarily a perpetuals trading hub: it allows people to bet on future price action of cryptocurrencies without actually owning them. But it has branched into many different DeFi product lines including borrow-lend facilities, yield-generating strategies and even a trading page for election-flavored memecoin enthusiasts.

"We're targeting the group of solana traders that have been trying to trade on prediction markets but have been refusing to use polymarket because it's on Polygon, both from an ideological and functionality perspective," Leow said in an interview.