#321: Polymarket's Expansion Via Partnerships, 2024 Web3 Growth Landscape

Ahoy! Continuing the new Thursday approach of multiple shorter topics. LMK what you think 😉

Earlier this week, prediction market Polymarket announced that they are partnering with Perplexity, a popular AI search engine. When users view a specific prediction market, they’re able to generate an AI-powered summary of the topic. There will be a search box that can be used to ask more questions, but it doesn’t seem that like feature has been rolled out yet.

Polymarket will have a dedicated page that will be featured on Perplexity’s Discover section, and their data will be used for visuals in certain queries.

This partnership announcement comes off the heels of Polymarket’s partnership with Substack, allowing authors to embed Polymarket odds directly into their newsletters, like below. In return, Polymarket launched its Substack newsletter, The Oracle.

These partnerships help position Polymarket for longer-term success beyond the historical boom-bust cycles that prediction markets have experienced historically, centered around election cycles.

Another strategy that Polymarket is implementing is creating social accounts that are categorically focused, starting with sports. I came across the Polymarket Sports account earlier this week, catering to sports fans and bettors who might not want all the noise from other topics like politics or crypto.

The Polymarket team is thinking about breadth and depth to make the most of their current traction and maximize relevancy after election season is over:

• [Breadth] Creating prediction markets across a variety of categories: Politics, Crypto, Pop Culture, Sports, Business, and Science, with more likely to come

• [Breadth] Making strategic partnerships to help be top of mind when users are off-platform and serve as additional channels for discovery

• [Depth] Creation of social accounts that cater to a specific category of topics and user

The Polymarket metrics have been impressive and are expected to reach all-time highs this month (we’re only halfway through the month!), so it’ll be interesting to see what activity will look like after the US election passes in early November.

Have you made a prediction before? If so, share or subscribe!

Safary published the 2024 edition of their popular web3 growth map featuring 159 companies across 11 categories.

Safary’s blog post shares insights on the evolving vertical and themes in each category. A few highlights (with a lot more in their post):

• $1B+ has been raised by 101 web3 growth & social startups

• Ad networks & Community Tools are the most crowded category with 19 teams, followed by Messaging & Loyalty with 18 teams each

• Loyalty saw the biggest contraction from 40+ teams in 2023 to 18 today

The interactive map (has links to the companies) and database are publicly available, so I encourage you to take a look at those. If you know a company that is missing on the map, fill out the form.

Helium, a decentralized wireless network built on Solana, announced that they partnered with 2 large US carriers. The beta period began in mid-June, with subscribers from these carriers using data from Helium Mobile Hotspots. With some impressive metrics 2 months in.

These types of numbers might not be as attractive to degens since there’s no overnight 10x to be made, but developments like these are exciting as we continue to see more success stories of blockchain use cases pop up that everyone can understand and appreciate.

On a separate note, Helium’s stats page provides a nice overview of the Helium network across subscribers, builders (Hotspot deployers), and the carrier offload beta. IMO the dashboard hits the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ of providing just enough context, KPIs, and data, but not to the point where it’s overwhelming. I’m a fan 😍

Blinks is a feature that launched on Solana back in June, allowing anyone to transact onchain anywhere online (eg: in the X feed, Discord, text message, etc.). Now that feature is live on Ethereum, courtesy of OKX Wallet.

Additionally, Solana Blinks may expand to mobile, with the SEND coin team sharing several prototypes of use cases and examples beyond the simple minting or purchasing a token use case:

• Using Blinks to claim airdrops

• Using Blinks to play mini-games

• Receiving Blink in the form of a survey or invoice

• Interacting with Blinks in a mobile app feed

Blinks are still early, but their use cases and embedding potential is growing just like Frames have on Farcaster.

See you next week!