How online prediction markets got people betting on nuclear war
As Israel and the U.S. launched an attack on Iran in late February, which quickly spilled into a region-wide war, betters on prediction market platform Polymarket have been monetising on the prospect of a nuclear weapon detonation.
In a since-deleted market on the platform, Polymarket users were betting on the chances of a nuclear weapon strike in 2026. But who is gaining from these bets, and is the issue more than ethical?
Prediction markets are online platforms where people can place bets on pretty much everything — from how much a Pokémon card would cost to how many times Elon Musk is going to post on X on a given month, to who would win Best Picture at the Oscars. There are even bets on whether or not Jesus Christ will return by 2027.
The most popular prediction platforms in the U.S. right now are Kalshi and Polymarket, both headquartered in New York City, but there are many others; just these two are worth $11 billion and $9 billion, respectively.
Prediction markets aren't new, but they really erupted around the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In New York, billboards on Times Square showed live bets people were placing on the election's outcome. In recent months, people have placed predictions on Polymarket on the length of the U.S. government shutdown and whether or not the U.S. would strike Iran. A user on Polymarket, notably, even placed a bet that Venezuela’s former president, Nicolás Maduro, would be ousted by the U.S. hours before it happened. The prediction earned the better $400,000, but it also raised a lot of questions about insider trading among government officials.
Insider trading is illegal in the U.S. under federal law. Kalshi has prohibited insider trading and has regulations that allow individual users to be tracked and investigated. But Polymarket does not have such rules around tracking. It's also technically not even approved in the U.S. but it still can be accessed using a VPN, so the platform's ability to check who placed which bets is limited.