Nate Silver joins prediction market Polymarket as advisor

Political analyst Nate Silver will join prediction market Polymarket’s oversight board, the company announced Tuesday.

Silver founded 538 in 2008 before leaving the political news and prediction site and its parent company ABC in 2023.

Polymarket is the country’s largest prediction market — a system allowing users to buy shares of an outcome, effectively creating a stock market on odds for certain events. The site covers both political and non-political events.

Polymarket events include whether President Joe Biden will leave the presidential race, as a rising number of Democrats have demanded. Shares of “yes” cost as high as 70 cents on July 4 — with the market effectively giving a 70 percent chance Biden leaves the race — though the price has since dropped to 32 cents.

Users have bet more than $16 million on that market alone, and over $400 million on the site so far this year.

Polymarket also gives former President Trump a 56 percent chance to win the November election, the U.S. the best odds to win the most gold medals at the Olympics and the Kansas City Chiefs a favorite to win this season’s Super Bowl, among other markets.

“I’m thrilled to join Polymarket as an advisor,” Silver said in a statement. “Prediction markets are playing an increasingly vital role in helping people understand and plan for the future.”

 “In the context of the current election, we’ve already seen how valuable it is to have a real-time data source about questions like the effects of the debate that are otherwise hard to quantify,” he continued.