Why Polymarket users are betting that Jesus Christ will return
There’s an outlandish Polymarket bet that asks, “Will Jesus Christ return in 2025?” It seems like an easy win — after all, the odds are surely stacked against another resurrection.
However, there are some who think it might actually be more profitable to bet on the prophet making a comeback.
AI alignment researcher Eric Neyman wanted to know why someone would bet on Jesus Christ’s return via Polymarket. In a blog published last March, he ruled out Christian zealots, buying it for the memes, and betting on a resolution mistake on Polymarket’s end.
Neyman’s friend Jesse Richardson, a Polymarket trader, put forward a “Time Value of Money” theory instead.
This hypothesised that “Yes” betters are possibly holding out for the “No” betters to get bored of waiting for their measly end-of-year returns, currently at 2.9%, or 97.1% odds.
In order to make $29,000 in profit, you’d have to bet $971,000 on “No” and wait till the end of the year.
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Richardson thinks the “No” betters may sell their positions to regain access to their funds when more interesting markets appear for them to gamble on.
If these “No” betters sell, the price of the “Yes” will increase and, as such, give the “Yes” betters a chance of a higher return, possibly doubling the odds from 3% to 6%.
Neyman wrote, “The Yes traders are betting that the time value of Polymarket cash will go up unexpectedly: that other traders will be short on cash to place bets with, and will at some point be willing to pay a premium to free up the cash that they spent betting against Jesus.”
Because of this, Neyman notes that if the market were placed in 2024, the “Yes” odds may have been higher as there were more prediction markets on offer.
As for now, he said, “There’s not much interesting stuff happening on Polymarket.”
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He concluded, “Jesus Christ will probably return in an election year (at least if you believe the prediction markets)!”
At the time of Neyman’s article, the Christ market had roughly $100,000 in volume, but now has over $500,000.
It’s worth noting that the “odds” of the son of God returning are based on binary options gamblers placing bets on whether or not UMA token holders would attest to Jesus Christ’s reported return.
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