How online prediction markets got people betting on nuclear war

For years, people have been making money off of bets on political disasters coming true

Lately, they're even betting on the likelihood of nuclear war. So, what are these bets

And who is gaining from apocalyptic predictions? As Israel and the US launched an attack on Iran in late February

which quickly spilled into a region-wide war, bettors on prediction market platform Polymarket

have been monetizing on the likelihood of a nuclear weapon detonation. In a since-deleted market on the platform

people are betting on the likelihood of a nuclear weapon strike in 2026

But who is gaining from these bets? And is the issue more than ethical

To begin with, prediction markets are online platforms where people place bets on pretty much everything

From how much a Pokemon card would cost, to how many times Elon Musk is going to post on X on a given month

to who will win Best Picture at the Oscars. The most popular prediction markets at the moment are Cauchy and Polymarket but there are many others Just these two are worth and billion respectively

Prediction markets have been around for a while, but they really erupted around the 2024

US presidential elections. At the time, if you went to Times Square, you would see giant

digital billboards showing live bets that people were placing on the election outcome

prediction markets have been surging ever since and bets are becoming more and more political

in recent months people have been placing bets on the u.s government shutdown and whether or not

the country would attack iran someone on polymarket notably even placed a bet on whether the u.s is

going to oust venezuelan president nicolas maduro hours before it actually happened the prediction

earned the better $400,000, but it also raised concerns about insider trading

New York Kaushy has prohibited insider trading and has regulations that allow individual users to be tracked and investigated Polymarket on the other hand does not have such policies and the platform is not even officially approved in the US but it can be accessed using a VPN What this means is that

basically there is no way to find out who placed that Maduro bet. It is also worth noting that

Donald Trump Jr. is currently both an investor and an advisor for Kaushy and Polymarket

Meanwhile, the Trump media group, ran by the current US president's children

is set to launch its own prediction market platform. The prospect of a nuclear war has been on Polymarket's prediction list for a while now

but the outbreak of war between the US and Israel on one hand and Iran on the other

has increased bets on it, reaching almost $244,000. This may seem like a small sum in comparison to other Polymarket predictions

but it caused a huge controversy and eventually the platform took them down

Part of the backlash came from increased concerns that government and military officials may be using prediction platforms to profit off of geopolitical events These concerns were renewed after bets that the U would go to war with Iran increased a day before the country launched its coordinated attack with Israel

There's a suspicious amount of new activity. People making a very specific bet on Friday

that we would go to war with Iran on Saturday. Obviously, there are people close to Donald Trump

who on Friday knew what was happening on Saturday. And it is very likely, probable even

that the people that placed those bets were people with inside information

On Thursday, March 5th, Senators Jeff Merkley and Amy Klobuchar introduced a bill that would ban senior government officials

such as the president, the vice president and members of Congress from trading event contracts

and limit prediction market activity for senior executive officials. But this bill is unlikely to go far

The Trump administration has backed both kaoshi and poly market in a legal battle where individual states

especially those where gambling has been criminalized, are trying to ban prediction markets