Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.
Launched in 2020, Polymarket rose to prominence last year as a way for people to bet on the outcome of the US presidential election. During the election cycle, Polymarket and its advocates pitched prediction markets as a superior method for predicting outcomes than traditional polling—as a more efficient “source of truth.” But that proposition has been challenged by the Zelensky suit debacle.
“Everybody knows the answer, but the system is currently broken,” claims defipolice. “It’s a fucked-up situation.”
Polymarket does reserve the right to overturn a UMA outcome. Last year, the company overruled UMA voting on a wager over whether Barron Trump was involved in a Trump-themed cryptocurrency project. At the time, Polymarket refunded bettors and explicitly described UMA’s conclusion as “wrong.” The company hasn’t stepped in every time, though. In March, a $7 million bet over whether Ukraine and the United States would reach a deal on mineral access was prematurely resolved with the wrong result. At the time, in a Discord message addressed to affected users, a Polymarket employee called it an “unprecedented situation” but said that it would not refund bettors.
Polymarket users aggrieved by the likely outcome of the Zelensky prediction market are gathering on messaging platform Discord to coordinate a response, potentially including pursuing a lawsuit against Polymarket and UMA, they claim.
“I do intend to join the lawsuit,” says a Polymarket bettor by the username Adversary, who at one stage stood to win $300,000 on their bet, before they pulled out some funds in response to the confusion. “I have experienced moral damages over this debacle, and the added context has caused me a great amount of stress.”
People in UMA’s Discord channel are similarly riled by the controversy, with community members accusing each other of “backchannel deals” and scams. Some view it as an unflattering referendum on the entire project. “This isn’t just a vote on a suit—it’s the vote on the future of UMA,” one member wrote.
The final resolution is expected by the evening of July 8. The cofounder of UMA, Hart Lumbur, says the organization is planning to make adjustments to the dispute resolution process in light of the Zelensky suit controversy, but rejects the allegation that the vote has been manipulated in any way.
“There is no evidence of manipulation of UMA. I really don’t like those meritless accusations,” Lambur tells WIRED. “After the dust settles on this suit-or-not market, I’m looking forward to having a productive conversation about improvements and design trade-offs.”
Others see this kind of disagreement as a natural part of the process: “For me this was a jacket that looked like a suit but wasn’t a suit,” says Lancelot Chardonnet, who voted as a delegate on behalf of the UMA.rocks token pool, which controls around 0.1 percent of the total supply. “This controversy simply reflects that the truth is complex and differs from one person to another.”
All of this heat arrives at a critical moment for Polymarket, which is in the middle of an aggressive fundraising round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund; according to Reuters, the prediction market will be valued at $1 billion. It’s not an ideal time to alienate some of its most active users, or for the integrity of its markets to come into question. “The silence from Polymarket has been deafening,” defipolice says.
