Size and demographic composition of Polymarket participants

Ascertain the number of individuals who participated in Polymarket’s 2024 U.S. presidential election markets and characterize their demographic attributes to evaluate the representativeness of the betting-market sample relative to traditional polling samples.

Background

The paper emphasizes that understanding who uses Polymarket is essential for interpreting market-based predictions. Due to platform restrictions, anonymity, and cryptocurrency usage, there is limited visibility into user counts and demographics. The authors explicitly state that both the number of bettors and their demographic characteristics are unknown, which complicates comparisons to poll-based samples and assessments of bias.