Sportstensor: The Groundtruth Information Engine for Polymarket

By: School of Crypto

Nowadays, you can bet on anything. Will Volodymyr Zelenskyy wear a suit? Will a fellow named Lord Miles finish his 40-day water fast? The world of culture, sports, politics, and any other arena of interest is now in prediction markets like Polymarket. Unlike traditional sports betting desks, which take enormous fees and lack inclusivity, Polymarket is a permissionless decentralized platform of ground truths in which people can make money based on their intelligence gathering and volume. 

Bittensor subnet number 41 Sportstensor is a prediction market information aggregator that incentivizes miners to make large-sized bets with high accuracy, and in return for alpha tokens. The team recently was guests on the popular Bittensor podcast Revenue Search and gave exciting nuggets about their product. The project has actually solidified a partnership with Polymarket itself. Sportstensor has built a prediction market that utilizes Polymarket as the liquidity layer. 

Based on all the volume Sportstensor provided to Polymarket, they agreed to allow Sportstensor to charge 1% fee to all participants on their own platform built on Polymarket. Subnet #41 then allocates these fees to buy back their alpha token.

Miners are scored by validators based on their signal, track record, ROI, and the volume that they trade with. Essentially, the miners are using their own money with their high conviction signals in order to score high on the Sportstensor leaderboard and earn alpha tokens based on their success. The subnet discourages pure gamblers with low volume and reckless strategy. This incentive mechanism allows for accurate ground truth predictions with the volume Polymarket is striving for, while compensating miners accordingly.

Sports were originally what Sportstensor was focusing on; however, they are now expanding into many other areas. The exciting part about Subnet #41 is that they are able to include all the other prediction subnets in the Bittensor ecosystem to participate as miners themselves. Through their partnership with Polymarket, they are allowed to create their own markets on the platform. For example, they could create a weather prediction market and use Zeus (whom they’ve actually collaborated with to provide data on how weather can influence games), and they could place volume with size based on their proprietary intel. The same can be said with other prediction markets that cover crypto like Mantis or Proprietary Trading Network (PTN); and other equities and assets plays like Synthdata.

Alpha token

As stated above, Sportstensor will use all the fees made on their platform, Almanac, to buy back their own alpha token. Additionally, through their incentive mechanism, which has not yet been coded (should be done in “weeks not months” according to the CEO), will match the fees made and distribute the alpha tokens to the miners, and burn the rest. In other words, they will never distribute more alpha tokens to the miners than the fees earned on the platform. This way, the incentive mechanism itself offsets all minor remissions, giving the alpha token price a shot in the arm on a daily basis. 

Consistent buy pressure and daily burns provide great scarcity and a fast-spinning flywheel for healthy price action of their alpha token. Their CEO, Leo Lucian, also spoke of the possibility of distributing potential Polymarket token airdrops to all subnet token holders based on all the activity they’ve had on the platform themselves.

The team

Stephen Rothwell and Leo Lucian are certainly the odd couple and make a cohesive team. Stephen has a very lengthy economic background with a master’s degree in statistics and economics/physics undergrad, while achieving amazing things in the real world. He’s done everything from building the first commercial quantum computer at D-Wave to working at multiple sports betting desks throughout his career. He’s a quiet guy who walks with a big stick and is known as one of the most intelligent people in the Bittensor ecosystem. 

Leo is the young, wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, overly positive entrepreneur who has unbridled enthusiasm for the project. A crypto native since 2017, Leo formerly mined TAO and founded Sportstensor in July of 2024. He’s a visionary with a plan and a fire to build a sustainable project and to do right for the Bittensor community as a whole. 

Contacts galore with a novel mission 

Steven’s rolodex of family offices, betting desks, and other high-net-worth individuals provides huge potential in garnering more liquidity on their prediction market platform, Almanac. And as mentioned before, the partnership with Polymarket allows for marketing their platform, getting access to millions of traders to onboard to their platform, and additional support for the project as a whole.

Sportstensor is on a mission to flip the archaic and gatekeeper betting markets of old right on its head. They plan to be a product that is here to stay and can last through a crypto bear market. The team’s enthusiasm and vision clearly show and are on the verge of nailing an amazing incentivization mechanism for millions of prediction market experts all around the world. As a miner, all you need is great intelligence, conviction, big volume, and you can win big with Sportstensor.

Potential for huge clients

Polymarket was the first platform to predict who would win the US election in 2024. The platform is eating away at biased media and news outlets. People are now valuing its metrics more than traditional sources. 

Not only are normal citizens putting more weight on these metrics, but you have huge players, even governments, that have a very strong motivation to utilize these signals and intelligence to make their own monetary decisions. Sportstensor has a chance to make millions of dollars in fees by shepherding massive amounts of liquidity from all sorts of whales and big players globally.

Game changer 

So ask yourself something: can you get the dope for a certain prediction market and gain an edge? Can you get enough valuable intelligence early on and put enough volume in, in order to get the best ROI? Sportstensor is the place to be for traders with an edge. You can also bet your bottom dollar that the team is all about bringing more value to Bittensor and strives to be one of the most valuable subnets in the ecosystem. 

The crypto industry as a whole has been looking for its killer dApp, and it appears that Polymarket has achieved that status. Sportstensor might just be the go-to brain to inform and educate traders to succeed in these fresh new markets.