Polymarket has launched a new Discord channel along with parlay rewards, inviting traders to pitch multi-leg parlay ideas that can be turned into on-platform markets. The move aims to crowdsource in-demand combos and pay users whose ideas get deployed and generate meaningful volume.
How Polymarket’s parlay program works
- What to submit: Lists of 2–6 specific markets, and every leg must resolve by Dec. 31, 2025.
- Selection process: Twice a week, moderators will surface 3–5 finalists for a 12-hour vote; one vote per user.
- Payouts: $50 to the first user who submitted any parlay that’s ultimately created on Polymarket; if that parlay later hits $1M in volume, the originator earns a $300 bonus.
The prediction market parlay problem
The push comes as prediction market platforms continue to try to translate the sportsbook parlay into an exchange product, a feat that has proven much easier said than done.
Parlays and same-game parlays (SGPs) are one of sportsbooks’ most engaging, and lucrative, products. They have generated an outsized share of revenue for online sportsbooks, and FanDuel has explicitly framed parlays as a higher-margin core product.
Exchanges like Polymarket and Kalshi, by contrast, don’t “book” risk themselves. The exchange model needs other traders to provide liquidity for requested parlays, which often require complex pricing across correlated legs and large amounts of capital to back.
Exchange innovation on the horizon?
Both Kalshi and Polymarket have signaled broader parlay ambitions, but idea bounties and community funnels are, at best, an engagement nudge rather than a product solution.
Others are trying to solve the problem, too. The most interesting potential breakthrough comes from a team of market-makers, Jesse Rosen and Kellen Sandvik, who propose “covariance markets” as a way to support true joint-probability trading without exploding the number of order books.
“It’s not something we’ve seen anywhere else,” Rosen said. “When we think about it, it makes so much sense that it just feels like something that kind of like exists naturally in the world and is more like a mathematical proof sort of thing than it is like inventing something new.”
Writing under the team name Chicken, Rosen and Sandvik continue to lay out the framework for covariance markets on their website Voliti.co.
“Another thing that’s cool about it is, for the user, they’re just going to see a parlay like any other market that they’re used to” Sandvik said. “They’re not even going to know that there is this update for the exchange. All the platforms need to do is add covariance markets, which is easy.”
“Whether or not someone decides to build it into an exchange, that’s one thing, but it is a derivative of prediction markets and is something that can exist, and really we think should exist,” Rosen said.
Bottom line
Polymarket’s parlay-ideas channel is a low-cost way to surface viral parlays and rally the community, but on its own is unlikely to move the needle.
If exchanges are to truly crack the parlay, something like covariance markets, or another credible joint-probability market design, will have to make it from white paper to production. Until then, expect incremental UX gains and limited offerings rather than a sportsbook-style parlay revolution.
