NEW YORK, NY — In a continued bid to gamify and corrupt every aspect of modern life, prediction market giant Polymarket announced Tuesday the launch of its newest product: live in-ceremony betting markets for ayahuasca retreats.
Dubbed TripTrade™, the platform allows spectators and fellow participants to wager on hundreds of real-time outcomes, including "Will the person next to me purge in the first 90 minutes?”, "Is the owner of this retreat from the Global North?", and "Probability that one of the retreat participants is an influencer who is making content on this retreat," among many other possibilities.
The company says markets are updated continuously using signals collected from Oura Rings and Apollo wearables worn by biohackers in the ceremony, GoPro cameras fixed to the alter, and similar surveillance tech present in the ceremonial space.
"We're bringing price discovery to altered states," said Polymarket spokesperson Mac Dingleberrié. "Mystical experiences need market efficiency to survive in the 21st Century."
Professional sports bettors have reportedly embraced the innovation after Polymarket recently sponsored a trial run of the service at a retired MMA fighters retreat in Peru.
“People are already intimately familiar with betting on fighters during their time in the Octagon or in the ring — now they can bet on their favorite fighters post-career healing processes as well.”
Retreat operators remain divided. While some praise the additional revenue stream, others worry participants are beginning to alter their behavior to influence the odds.
"We had one guy refuse to surrender to the medicine for nearly three hours because he'd taken the over on his own ego death," said a facilitator in Peru. "We had to burn like 30 mapachos to calm him down at the end of the ceremony"
“If you’ll notice, many plant medicine ceremonies already embrace syncretization and have for centuries — be it the merging of the Velada mushroom rituals with elements of Catholicism in the Sierra Mazateca Mountains or the Iboga ceremonies among the Bwiti spiritual tradition that were inherited and adapted from non-dogmatic traditional use of the root by Pygmy populations before them — spiritual and religious traditions evolve over time, and live prediction markets in ceremony are simply the next logical evolution of that',” said Dingleberrié.
At press time, Polymarket had temporarily suspended trading after a participant in one of the ceremonies correctly predicted every outcome by claiming they'd "already seen this timeline" during the opening Icaros.