WASHINGTON — If only someone could have predicted this.
The much anticipated opening of a new bar in downtown Washington, D.C., by the prediction platform Polymarket — promising 80-plus televisions, touchscreen trackers and a giant globe listing current predictions around the world — didn’t kick off as organizers had planned.
“Monitoring the Situation,” as the temporary facade outside read, became hard to do inside, with no power or Wi-Fi running to any of the TVs that lined every wall of the restaurant. That meant no X feeds. No stock market reports. No flight trackers.
Many inside the bar had never used Polymarket and were excited to see what it had to offer.
They didn’t see much.
The packed bar included journalists, Polymarket investors, Polymarket staff and contractors, and prediction market fans, along with a few “just curious” people with nothing better to do on a Friday night. In conversations, there was deep concern about regulation of the prediction market and the potential for insider trading, given Polymarket’s cryptocurrency-based transactions, which allow its users to remain anonymous.
“I’m here because I love the concept of this,” said a 20-something D.C. resident who said he works in risk consulting and wouldn’t provide his name because of the risk of being associated with Polymarket. “But I think the company is predatory. This is all going to go up in flames.”
Asked about the bar’s technical failures, Polymarket directed NBC News on Saturday morning to a post on X stating in part that “the situation monitors are now on and ready to be monitored,” without addressing the power issue.
Speaking to NBC News before the bar’s doors opened, Georgetown student EJ Jazzar said he makes money predicting more mundane things on Polymarket. “Last week, I bet on the weather just because I knew it was gonna be cold,” Jazzar said. “I don’t bet crazy money.”
He was right: It was cold the next day, and he won $50.
“Sometimes, I predict people who are going to attend the Oscars,” said another man, who also refused to give his name. “I have a guy that knows who’s going to be there.”
“So you’re benefiting from someone with inside information,” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t you,” he shot back, before being pulled away by a friend.
The bar pop-up was the most recent in a series of promotional efforts by Polymarket and its main rival, Kalshi, to promote their online markets through real-world experiences. Earlier this year, both companies set up temporary grocery stores in New York City where each gave away food.
The two platforms have exploded in popularity over the past year, as prediction markets have become popular among people looking to wager on everything from news and pop culture events to sports, the latter of which has led to a major boom for the markets.
Along with the rise of those markets has come a new phrase used by some online as a tongue-in-cheek way to describe the act of observing the nearly nonstop deluge of current events: monitoring the situation. Friday’s bar event was a direct ode to that sensibility, combined with the notion that such monitoring could also lead to a financial windfall.
But Polymarket’s meteoric rise in popularity is garnering attention from more than just the bar patrons, who continued to show up in droves, despite the lack of anything to do or see inside the bar on Friday night besides, well, drink.
This week, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, introduced legislation to ban predictions and trading on the topics of war, terrorism, assassinations and anything that could be considered a “government action.”
The bill was spurred by a surge of anonymous, last-minute trades before the Iran war began predicting that the U.S. would strike before Feb. 28. One user by the name of “Magamyman” made more than $500,000 from correctly predicting when the U.S. would strike Iran, and another made $123,317 predicting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be out of power before the end of March.
“There’s no getting around the fact that any prediction market where somebody knows or controls the outcome of a bet is ripe for corruption,” Murphy said in a statement announcing the legislation. “Even worse, prediction markets are also an avenue by which government decisions get influenced by who’s making money off them, and that should be unforgivable to the American public. When events that involve good and evil, life and death, become just another financial product, morality no longer matters and the soul of America is fundamentally corrupted.”
Jazzar wasn’t concerned about the potential legislation. “I guess the whole thing is knowing your strengths and knowing your expertise a little bit more,” he said. “It’s not illegal to have fun, nowadays.”
As this NBC News reporter was walking out of the bar on Friday night after it closed at 9:00 p.m. — hours before it was scheduled to — he heard a 30-something guy say to two of his friends: “I wanted to monitor the situation, dude.”
