Polymarket’s election trading figures can grow long after an election has stopped being meaningfully uncertain. Kate Knibbs reports for WIRED that two election markets on its offshore platform generated more than $600 million in volume. Much of the activity involved losing candidates and continued after the races had ended or been canceled.
An Ethiopian election market recorded more than $285 million in trades, overwhelmingly on candidates who lost. Chris Park of forensic analysis firm MSR Decode says about $284 million came from pairs of accounts repeatedly trading with each other. The rules tied settlement to the prime minister’s formal appointment and swearing-in in October, leaving the market open for months after the election. That delay created room for trading with little apparent connection to uncertainty about the result.
MSR Decode examined more than 38,000 rapid buy-and-sell loops after the election. Over 98% left neither side with a gain or loss, and the median holding time was nine seconds. In a separate Romanian market kept open after the original election was canceled, economist Rajiv Sethi says an algorithm flagged 99.6% of volume in certain weeks as wash trading. That means transactions designed to create the appearance of activity by moving assets back and forth.
The accounts’ identities remain unknown, and Sethi cautions that apparent wash trading can have other explanations. Polymarket says it flagged the activity, investigated and blocked the accounts. It did not answer WIRED’s follow-up question about how so much volume accumulated before action was taken. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission declined to say whether it was examining these election trades.
Trading volume counts repeated transactions, so it can overstate how many people are participating or how much independent information a market contains. That matters when prediction platforms sell their activity as evidence of growth and their prices as authoritative signals about public events. Bettors and readers bear the information risk when those claims rest on inflated activity. The investigation raises concrete questions about settlement delays and market surveillance, while leaving the traders’ motives and any resulting customer losses unresolved.