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Are prediction markets still culture war? I bring this up because there's been some... controversy surrounding Polymarket and its resolution of a bet earlier this week. The market in question is this one regarding whether Microstrategy will sell any Bitcoins by a certain date. In particular I want to draw your attention to the recently resolved sub-market for May 31st. If you expand the history of the market you'll notice some very odd behavior for the odds. On June 1st, after the deadline for the sale had passed, the odds briefly spike up over 56% before crashing to essentially 0. Why did people become so convinced that Microstrategy had sold bitcoin in the window? And then why did people become so convinced that Microstrategy hadn't?
They might have been convinced in the first place because on June 1st Microstrategy published their 8-K which said they had sold 32 Bitcoin between May 26th and May 31st. That seems like a good reason to believe that Microstrategy had sold bitcoin before May 31st! Unless you thought their 8-K was a lie. It seems like it was a mistake to let people trade after it was public information which way the bet would resolve, but that's what happened.
Then why did the odds crash back down to near 0? Well, on June 1st the market was updated to add this disclaimer:
It's true that in reality Microstrategy did sell bitcoin before May 31st. A bunch of people did correctly predict that. But the market pays out to people who made a false prediction because the evidence that Microstrategy sold bitcoin didn't come out until the day after the deadline!
This isn't the first time a prediction market has had some controversy over how they resolved a market. Kalshi had a similar scandal earlier this year concerning its resolution of a market on whether Ali Khamenei would remain in power in Iran. This ones feel pretty blatant as a resolution for certain polymarket insiders who control how markets resolve via crypto vote, though.
There's often an assumption that prediction market odds track some kind of real probability of an event (predicetion markets themselves certainly lean into this) and that therefore their resolutions will track reality. I think this is a reminder that this is less true than we might suppose.
I think this is the case where polyarket will end up standardizing and tightening the rules around the timeframe that confirmation must take place. For example, this iran market https://polymarket.com/event/iran-ceasefire-continues-through says:
At least in this case the rules are clear that the proof of the event must happen by a cetain deadline. So even though the may 24th market stayed open for a week after, there are rules on what can be considered.
If there are no rules of course, then there's always the temptation to drag the market on in the hopes of new evidence coming to light. Maybe polymarket already has "default" rules for this but I don't know about it.
There's an infinite supply of edge cases and rules lawyerings. The long-term push for stuff will this (especially when an actual gambling and/or financial commission gets involved) will likely just be to cull as much of the niche markets as possible
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Does polymarket no longer resolve markets through their secondary market mechanism?
Yes that's the UMA which is influenced by how much of their crypto token you hold and therefore skews insider
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Obviously this is an insane rules lawyer stripout but it's reflective of why PMs will in the fullness of time slowly abandon all non-sports content as they are regulated and consider the novel real world stuff as too difficult to grade and manage
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