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Do Prediction Markets Match Option Prices? Bitcoin Threshold Evidence from Binance and Polymarket

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  • Victoria Portnaya

Abstract

The digitization of financial markets has produced two classes of platforms that price, in principle, the same state - contingent payoffs: centralized crypto-option exchanges and blockchain-based prediction markets. This paper provides the first option-implied benchmark test of prediction-market pricing for cryptocurrency threshold contracts. For each hour in a matched sample, we compare the Polymarket Yes price with the discounted risk-neutral binary value implied by a listed Binance call option on the same underlying, strike, and maturity, and study the gap between them. In the main September 2023 Bitcoin contract, the mean pricing gap equals 5.6 percentage points across 214 hourly observations (t = 6.46, p

Suggested Citation

  • Victoria Portnaya, 2026. "Do Prediction Markets Match Option Prices? Bitcoin Threshold Evidence from Binance and Polymarket," Papers 2606.19517, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2606.19517
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