What The Hell Is Polkamarkets (POLK) & Why Is Its Price Surging?

POLK has spiked 45% in the past 24 hours – what does this unknown altcoin have to offer?

What The Hell Is Polkamarkets (POLK) & Why Is Its Price Surging?

Polkamarkets homepage screenshot.

Polkamarket’s native cryptocurrency, POLK, has surged over 45% in the last 18 hours, spiking quickly from $0.25 ($0.33 AUD) yesterday to $0.37 ($0.49 AUD) today. This has led many investors to question what on earth POLK is and why it’s performing so well recently, after suffering from lacklustre performance since its introduction on the 25th of February last year. At the time of writing POLK is down a little over 90% from its all-time high of $3.62 ($4.81 AUD) in mid-March last year. 

POLK 1 Year Price Graph: CoinMarketCap

What Is Polkamarkets (POLK)?

Polkamarkets describes itself as a “DeFi-Powered Prediction Market”, which in plain english is essentially a very technical gambling platform that runs on a blockchain. Polkamarkets lets crypto enthusiasts to make speculations about real world events and back it up with cryptocurrency. 

Fun fact: the concept of prediction markets actually dates back several decades, with the first modern electronic prediction market introduced during the 1988 US presidential election. According to one study, prediction markets tend to be fairly fairly accurate and usually outperform other predictive tools like polls. 

Why is the price of POLK increasing?

The entire crypto market is currently experiencing a broader rally, with altcoins (all cryptocurrencies that aren’t Bitcoin or Ethereum) also seeing substantial gains. 

While there’s no major news concerning Polkamarkets, the POLK token is among a series of much smaller tokens that traders have recently found to be an attractive buying opportunity, according to a new influx of posts about the token doing the rounds on “crypto twitter.”

POLK Price Prediction

According to forecasting from DigitalCoinPrice, POLK is a good buy for the long-term, with analysts expecting the Polkamarkets token to be worth roughly $0.43 ($0.57 AUD) by the end of this year. From there, POLK is predicted to finish 2023 at $0.48 ($0.64 AUD) and by 2025 the token could be worth around $0.64 ($0.85 AUD), a healthy 72% increase from today’s price.

Super low-market cap tokens like POLK, which is currently valued at roughly $22 million ($29 million AUD) and is ranked as number 771 by market cap, are usually what experts call “super risky”. Even the largest cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum experience massive volatility, so it should come as no surprise that tiny altcoins are even more prone to enormous swings in price. 

Is POLK actually worth buying?

Polkamarkets is still in a very, very niche area of DeFi, which is itself a niche area of crypto, which means that investing in POLK is pretty risky if you’re not familiar with all of the ins and outs of decentralized finance and Web3.

Other prediction market services haven’t been having a great time either, mostly because they lack incentives for regular use and don’t provide much in the way of entertainment value. Polkamarkets seems to be a little different in this regard, because it allows for day by day speculation on a whole host of different sports, financial markets and political happenings. 

According to their roadmap, Polkamarkets also plans to begin offering a more “gamified” experience by integrating NFTs (non fungible tokens) as well as live streams, virtual events, and giveaways.

Polkamarkets Conclusion

Ultimately, figuring out which way POLK will move from here is anyone’s guess. There doesn’t seem to be an enormous downside risk (the possibility that the token will totally collapse from here) as it’s already down a solid 90% from its all-time-high and its price has remained relatively consistent over the past few months. If you think that Polkamarkets offers a unique service that people will want to use, then maybe grabbing up some POLK wouldn’t be the worst idea.

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