Polymarket Manipulation: How Vote Distortion Affected Crypto Bets
Date: 2025-03-27 Author: Gabriel Deangelo Categories: BUSINESS
The largest decentralized live betting platform, Polymarket, has found itself at the center of a scandal after it was revealed that it attempted to influence the outcome of a bet using a third-party protocol. The bet involved a hypothetical mining deal between Ukraine and Donald Trump. Although the end date for the bet was set for March 31, it was ended early with a “yes” status despite no confirmed event.
The manipulation occurred via the UMA oracle, a blockchain protocol that Polymarket relies on to confirm bet results. In the UMA system, token holders vote on the outcome of an event. A user pays $750 in stablecoins to submit a resolution, after which the decision is made based on the results of a vote by UMA token holders.
In this case, a major UMA holder allegedly used around 5 million tokens (approximately $7.1 million) to vote from three different accounts. This amounted to a quarter of all votes, allowing him to approve the desired outcome despite the fact that no event had actually occurred. This interference caused outrage among users, but the Polymarket team stated that no compensation was provided, as the dispute was resolved according to the established rules.
In a statement, the platform representatives emphasized that they are committed to building a sustainable, trustworthy prediction ecosystem and called the situation unprecedented. According to them, active negotiations were underway with UMA to prevent similar incidents in the future.
It is worth noting that Polymarket has previously sought to revise the voting results. In 2024, a dispute over Barron Trump's possible connection to the DJT memecoin launched on the Solana blockchain was canceled, despite the decision of UMA voters.
As for the current incident, according to Polymarket Analytics, the most successful participants received between $33,000 and $55,000, while the losers lost up to $73,000. However, the exact extent of the manipulation is difficult to determine, as multiple accounts that are not directly linked to each other are possible.
However, despite the distortions, the accuracy of the platform's predictions remains high. According to research by New York-based analyst Alex McCullough, about 90% of Polymarket's predictions are correct. Long-term forecasts, which take into account rare scenarios that simplify the assessment of probabilities, have proven to be especially reliable.
