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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 am neither a prediction market nor cryptocurrency expert, but this seems to be bad from the very start.
A good prediction market is one where no actor can unilaterally decide the outcome at zero costs to themselves. For example, you might ask if some politician would remain in power, because they can not unilaterally decide to stay in power if external factors (impeachment, assassination, etc) force them out, and while they are free to resign, this will typically come at high costs to themselves.
This one seems as bad as a mention market. It is like playing roulette when the rules are that after you have placed your bet, the croupier will just place the ball at the number they feel should win and announce it.
Even if MicroStrategy will not directly change their behavior to fix the prediction market ("On Tuesday, we sold 100 sat worth of bitcoin, so better pay up, sucker"), it seems still a bad market to compete in because another party will have a substantial information advantage. Like, if you bet on the outcome of some kind of competition, like an election, sports event or war, some people have some insider information (like 'Player X got injured in training'), but at least their edge will be limited.
So there is already plenty of excellent reasons not to play in this market even before one gets to the fact that the resolution criteria will be just changed ex post facto to benefit the investors of one side of the trade. (On the object level, it seems very simple. If MicroStrategy sold any BTC, that would involve transactions on the block chain. So the "on-chain data" will reflect that fact (once the transaction is made part of the block chain by a miner). The fact that it is not commonly known who owns each address is quite frankly just a skill issue. Also, there is obviously a difference between "cutoff date for the bet" and "determination on what the facts were at the cutoff date". If a runner wants to contest his second place on grounds that it took photographic evidence to determine that he was not first, and that this clearly indicates that at the time he crossed the finish line, there was no credible information that he was not first, he would be laughed out of any court.)
I am also a bit surprised at this failure mode. My understanding is that people who hold some kind of token get to vote on the resolution of disputed markets, but the Polymarket docs I found do not go into a lot of detail. Ideally, one would want the people who vote to be the people who own Polymarket. Betters would ideally judge the worth of the company against their trade volume and only deal with them if they are convinced that a rug pull will not be more lucrative for the company than keeping running honestly.
What is interesting is that the trading volume of that market was 400M$, which is high but still small compared to the worth of Polymarket (16G$ or so). The worth of Polymarket hinges almost entirely on the presumption that it will fairly resolve markets. Nobody is going to play in a Casino where the boss will simply tell the dealer that the ball did not come to rest at the red nine but at the black 22 next to it.
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