There’s blood on the streets and crypto gamblers on Polymarket are betting that Bitcoin is far from its bottom.
Forty-five percent of traders on the prediction market Polymarket believe that Bitcoin’s price will fall below $45,000 before September. This spiked at a 65% chance in early European trading hours on Monday amid a market meltdown. It's worth pointing out, though, that there's currently less than $300,000 worth of bets in that pool.
Bitcoin fell below $55,000 overnight amid macroeconomic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions rising. This sell off continued, now currently at $50,000 with over $1 billion of liquidations taking place in the past 24 hours.
For the sake of comparison, Polymarket bettors gave Bitcoin a 5% chance of dropping below $45,000 before September just a few days ago. Even yesterday, when the turmoil had already started to roil markets, odds stayed between 5% and 15%.
But it isn’t just Bitcoin that Polymarket traders are bearish on.
According to one pool , Ethereum has just a 3% chance of being above $3,000 on August 9, four days from the time of writing. When this pool was created on Aug 2, bettors gave Ethereum a 75% chance of being priced above $3,000.
This comes as Ethereum takes a similar tumble to Bitcoin, falling 22% on the day and 33% over the week. At the time of writing, the Ethereum price has settled at $2,210. Ethereum accounted for $368 million worth of the liquidations that took place in the crypto market, according to CoinGlass . The vast majority, about $313 million, were long positions.
In response to the market upset, Polymarket has created a Market Crash tab that sits next to the U.S. election tab.
The chances of an emergency interest rate cut being announced by the Federal Reserve has spiked to 50% amid this market meltdown—up from 23% just yesterday. This has also seen bettors place money on the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) announcing an interest cut of over 50 basis points in its September meeting , jumping to a 65% chance from 9% at the beginning of the month.
It's more often been the case that analysts use CME FedWatch as a measure of trader sentiment. The FedWatch tool primarily relies on price data for 30-day federal fund futures contracts. CME is currently showing investors think there's a 91.5% that the Fed will target a rate of 475 to 500 basis points—a cut 50 basis points lower than the current rate. The most likely target one week ago was 500 to 525 with 88.2% probability according to the CME tool.
In much more illiquid pools, Polymarket traders have given the U.S. a 30% chance of having a recession this year and a 20% chance of bank failure by September. But, it is important to note, very small amounts of capital have been traded on these markets so these figures are likely to move.
