Whitepaper Reading ETHDenver - Microeconomics of Prediction Markets
Whitepaper Reading Session EthDenver
A roundtable discussion by builders, for builders — dissecting the protocols, primitives and design choices. Hosted at the LVC, National Western Center.
Topics:
1. The Super Bowl of Prediction Markets: Kalshi and Polymarket's Battle for Price vs Liquidity
An empirical comparison of Kalshi and Polymarket across every NFL game in the 2025 season. The study finds Kalshi leads price adjustments by ~7 seconds, but Polymarket requires 3–4× more volume to move prices by the same amount — suggesting that faster markets aren't always deeper ones. We'll discuss the market design choices driving these differences and what they mean for prediction market infrastructure.
Authors: Ally Zach + Danning Sui from Pantera Capital
Summary: [COMING SOON]
2. Prediction Markets as Bayesian Inverse Problems
A formal framework for inferring event outcomes from observed price-volume histories. The paper models prediction markets as Bayesian inverse problems under a latent mixture of trader types — covering informed and uninformed trading, microstructure noise, and adversarial flow. It provides tools for quantifying when market data is actually informative vs. when inference breaks down.
Authors: Juan P. Madrigal-Cianci, Camilo Monsalve Maya, and Lachlan Breakey from Kosmos Ventures
Links: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18815
Summary: [COMING SOON]
Topic Leads:
Location: LVC (Livestock Center) at the National Western Center - Cimarron River Room (Hydro)
Thank you to EthDenver for offering their space to host this discussion. 🙏
Format
Round table discussions (No panels)
This session starts with 5–10 minutes of silent reading, followed by a roundtable discussion of The CoinAlg Bind and its implications for collective investing, AI trading agents, and DeFi.
Summaries: We create summaries to help everyone understand.
About Pantera | BigBrain
About Whitepaper Reading Club
The Whitepaper Reading Club is a community of 700 engineers, founders, core-devs, researchers, across Singapore, Malaysia, San Francisco and New York who come together to read and discuss blockchain papers (website). We create summaries for each paper (summaries) and have held 70+ sessions since 2023.
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