\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
When U.S. Delta Force commandos slipped into Venezuelan airspace over the weekend, they did so in secrecy. And yet, in the hours before President Donald Trump gave the final order for the strike, someone bet more than $20,000 that Nicol\u00e1s Maduro would be ousted as the country\u2019s leader by the end of January.<\/p>\n
On Polymarket, the online platform that lets people wager on almost anything, an anonymous trader somewhere in the world placed a series of suspiciously well-timed bets. Using a fresh account created last month, the individual made just a few bets in the days leading up to the raid, according to The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2014all on the possibility of imminent regime change in Venezuela\u2014and appeared to come away with more than $400,000.<\/p>\n Perhaps the bettor just got phenomenally lucky. Or perhaps they knew about the raid ahead of time and leveraged it for a quick payout. We can\u2019t know, because Polymarket, a so-called prediction market where people turn their idle hunches into real cash, allows some of its customers to remain anonymous. Traders place their bets using crypto, which could provide another layer of cover. The Maduro trade has generated a huge amount of speculation and controversy; the internet is now full of jokes that Barron Trump, hunched behind dual monitors in his NYU dorm room, may have been behind it.<\/p>\n This is not the first instance of a well-timed bet on Polymarket raising questions about insider trading. Just before Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, a leader of Venezuela\u2019s opposition to Maduro, was declared the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, the probability that she would win the award began to spike on Polymarket (despite a highly secretive selection process). The Nobel Institute has said that it may have been a victim of espionage. Early last month, a trader made a series of bets related to Google\u2019s most popular searches of 2025. Just before the company released its \u201cYear in Search\u201d report, the user bet on some of those top searches with uncanny accuracy. In the end, the account netted more than $1 million.<\/p>\n Traditional financial markets have clear-cut rules around insider trading: Capitalizing on nonpublic information is plainly illegal. Polymarket seems to have no such policies in its terms of use (although it does ban activity that violates \u201capplicable laws\u201d). The company\u2019s CEO, Shayne Coplan, has also explicitly said that Polymarket creates a \u201cfinancial incentive for people to go and divulge\u201d new information. The thinking is that, if the function of these tools is to predict the future, then rewarding people for leaking information could be seen as a positive. When insiders push markets toward what\u2019s actually going to happen, they can hypothetically turn prediction markets into a source of real-time unfiltered news. There are legal ways to find and divulge new information\u2014say, in scraping publicly available data for an edge over other traders\u2014but Coplan did not draw that distinction. (Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n Not all prediction markets share this ethos. Kalshi, Polymarket\u2019s biggest competitor, \u201cexplicitly prohibits insider trading of any form,\u201d a spokesperson told me over email. But the concept of treating insider trading as a feature rather than a bug seems to be gaining traction. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase\u2014a cryptocurrency exchange that recently purchased a prediction-market firm\u2014laid out this line of thinking at The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 DealBook Summit last month: \u201cIf your goal is actually for the 99 percent of people trying to get signal about what\u2019s going to happen in the world\u2014like, \u2018Is the Suez Canal going to be reopened?\u2019 or whatever\u2014you actually want<\/em> insider trading.\u201d<\/p>\n Outsourcing privileged information to prediction markets in the name of \u201cnews\u201d has some clear problems. Maduro\u2019s ouster is a helpful example: Both the Times<\/em> and The Washington Post<\/em> reportedly learned of the plans for Saturday\u2019s raid before it happened, and held off on publishing their stories to avoid endangering U.S. troops. No such editorial-judgment calls are being made across betting markets. The democratization of certain kinds of information can be a social good\u2014but not like this.<\/p>\n As it becomes easier for people to bet on everyday phenomena, more opportunities will open up for insiders to leverage private information for fast cash. Hypothetically, the Deloitte employees who tabulate Grammy votes can bet on who might win Song of the Year, and the White House aide with a sense of the president\u2019s mood can bet on whether he\u2019ll publicly use the word fuck<\/em> before the end of the month. It\u2019s no secret that these markets can be gamed. Armstrong closed Coinbase\u2019s most recent earnings call with a string of non sequiturs (\u201cBitcoin, ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web3\u201d) in a nod to the traders betting on whether those specific words would crop up during the call.<\/p>\n Polymarket has become enormously popular, even though its main platform isn\u2019t meant to be accessed from within the United States. In 2022, the company shut down its domestic service as part of a settlement with the Biden administration over alleged regulatory violations. Still, American bettors have found an easy work-around in the digital trickery of VPNs, or virtual private networks. Polymarket is now gearing up for a U.S. comeback, with the support of the new White House. The company tapped a former Trump campaign manager to lobby on its behalf last year, and Donald Trump Jr. now serves as an adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi. The Trump family\u2019s media company is working on a prediction market too: Truth Predict.<\/p>\n Insider trading is frowned upon because it further slants an already uneven playing field, further enriching those in proximity to the biggest and most consequential decisions of the day and leaving the public at a disadvantage. This, at least, has been the prevailing view for much of the modern history of American commerce. Traditional financial markets aren\u2019t always fair, but they at least purport to operate from a shared perspective. Among the central innovations of prediction markets is the idea that an unequal playing field might actually facilitate the truth. It\u2019s a convenient line. But it obscures the fact that these are still very much also just markets. When insiders win, the rest of us lose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When U.S. Delta Force commandos slipped into Venezuelan airspace over the weekend, they did so in secrecy. And yet,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4702,10799,2182,312],"class_list":{"0":"post-40627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bets","9":"tag-maduro","10":"tag-polymarket","11":"tag-warning"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}