‘Abhorrent’: the inside story of the Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war

A Guardian investigation exposes how Polymarket's prediction markets, where millions are wagered on geopolitical events, are influencing news cycles and arbitrating reality. | Contesto: cronaca

Punti chiave

• ‘Abhorrent’: the inside story of the Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war

Contesto

An investigation has uncovered the sprawling, multi-million-dollar ecosystem of Polymarket, a decentralized prediction market where anonymous traders gamble on the outcomes of global conflicts, humanitarian crises, and political events, with their financial bets increasingly shaping the news cycle and establishing a controversial, crowd-funded version of the truth. The platform, which operates on cryptocurrency and largely outside traditional financial regulation, has seen surging volumes, with one market focused on the Israel-Gaza conflict alone attracting over $10 million in wagers. Traders, using pseudonyms like "Horekunden," obsessively track real-world developments, from battlefield movements in Ukraine to diplomatic statements, seeking any informational edge to profit from their predictions on questions of war and peace. The internal dynamics of these markets reveal a complex feedback loop with traditional media. Traders scrutinize reports from established sources like the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), whose daily Ukraine maps become critical data points for multi-thousand-dollar positions. Frustration erupts in trading forums when these sources are perceived as slow or inaccurate, highlighting the market's dependency on—and impatience with—conventional journalism. Conversely, the aggregated "wisdom of the crowd" on Polymarket, presented as a simple probability percentage, is itself becoming a source for news articles and social media discourse, granting a financialized metric outsized influence in framing how events are perceived. This fusion of gambling and geopolitical analysis has drawn sharp condemnation from observers and participants alike, with some describing the practice of betting on human suffering as "abhorrent." Markets have been created on topics ranging from the duration of the Ukraine war to the potential for a wider regional conflict in the Middle East, effectively commodifying catastrophe. Critics argue that this not only trivializes profound human tragedy but also creates perverse incentives, where a trader's financial gain is directly tied to negative outcomes like prolonged violence or diplomatic failure. The ethical...

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Categoria: cronaca