Polymarket Traders Vote on Jesus' Return
Olivia Capozzalo & Squiffs _
February 19, 2026
gm, Defiers!
Today’s big story:
- After Polymarket debuted sponsored rewards, a user accidentally contributed $70K to incentivize the “Will Jesus Christ Return before 2027” market — and volumes are surging.
In other news
- Base leaves Optimism
- CME announces 24/7 crypto futures
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- Rocket Pool’s Saturn One Upgrade [SPONSORED]
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📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours
| TICKER | VALUE | 24H | |
|---|---|---|---|
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 | BNB | $599.13 | -2.77 % |
 | Solana | $80.51 | -2.05 % |
Today’s Big Story
Polymarket’s New Incentives Feature Fuels Volume Surge on ‘Will Jesus Christ Return’ Market
As the prediction market wars wage on, Polymarket’s newest feature — sponsored rewards — is off to a hot start after one user accidentally contributed $70,000 of their own money to incentivize the “Will Jesus Christ Return before 2027” market.
User SixCart contributed the sum over a 2 day period, meaning that liquidity providers to the market were set to earn a share of $35,634 over a 24-hour period, for two days straight.
Traders and farmers flooded the order book, resulting in more than $29 million in volume traded on the market over the last 24 hours. However users have reported that they are not receiving LP rewards in line with the massive rewards pool, indicating that the Polymarket team may have disabled the outlandish incentives, though this has not been confirmed or denied by the company.
A Polymarket developer did post on X last night that the team has successfully added the option to cancel sponsorships as well, following the events.
The incident serves as a humorous way to kick off the sponsored rewards feature and the huge surge in volume proves as a proof of concept for the presumed end goal of user incentivized liquidity rewards.
While the prediction market’s 2025 was mostly defined by investment rounds, mainstream partnerships, and its ongoing rivalry with its main regulated U.S. competitor, Kalshi, Polymarket seems to be doing everything it can to boost liquidity on the platform this year.
Earlier this month, it was announced that Jump Trading invested in Polymarket in exchange for market making services on the platform. Sports markets on Polymarket are now very clearly automated by sophisticated operators as opposed to degens with homemade AMM bots, and LP incentive pools are now much larger than they were in 2025.
More Efficient Markets
At one point $200 was the max incentive Polymarket would give out for LPs. Now, the prediction market offers $500 per day to provide liquidity to an array of stock “up or down” markets. While this initial setup boosts liquidity on set markets, user sponsorships take liquidity boosting to a new level.
The feature doesn’t just benefit Polymarket either. Once market depth advances and users can incentivize more niche markets, anyone who has favorably filled an illiquid market can then incentivize said market’s spread and influence farmers to step in and make the market, thus making it more efficient.
Those providing the incentives can basically use the sponsorship markets to create their own exit liquidity at the cost of their sponsorship.
Here’s what that could look like:
Plenty of Polymarket’s markets lack liquidity, making it easy for users to get favorable fill prices when counterparties don’t understand, or misinterpret slippage. So say you, as a trader, assign a market’s true odds are somewhere around 75%, but thanks to the market’s lack of liquidity you have a low bid at 50% that gets filled.
Filling your bid at the desired level is the first step, but you still need to be able to exit that position, and if a market has little to no attention, your previous option was to simply wait for other people to notice the market and sell into the new volume.
Now you can incentivize the market with your own money — aka sponsored rewards — to potentially attract more liquidity that would, in theory, eventually bid the market to its “fair price” of 75%. That would create enough liquidity for you to trade out of the position and realize a 50% gain on the initial capital, minus the cost of your incentives.
While this mechanism is not guaranteed by any means, the new feature should allow for this kind of market efficiency, incentivized by traders themselves, instead of Polymarket needing to hand pick mispriced or popular markets to incentivize.
The increased focus on market depth comes with Polymarket token rumors hitting a fever pitch, as members of the team continue to interact with users on X as if a token is guaranteed.
However, investors have reported that their contributions to Polymarket included terms for both equity and a token, so it is unclear exactly who earns what, and exactly how much value a $POLY token would have, especially if a Polymarket IPO is inevitable.
Squiffs, resident degen at The Defiant
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