Did Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky wear a suit? It should be a simple question, but a dispute over the answer has torn apart bettors on the gambling site Polymarket. With a collective $210 million on the line, some claim to have been denied their rightful winnings.
Polymarket is a platform that allows users to gamble cryptocurrency on the outcome of a particular event, ranging from sports games to election outcomes to niche wagers on movie box office results. Each individual prediction market is framed as a binary question. In this case: “Will Zelensky wear a suit before July?”
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Zelensky pledged to wear only military-style fatigues in solidarity with frontline soldiers. The Ukrainian leader’s sartorial choices have since become a media preoccupation, criticized in some quarters as disrespectful, particularly after a heated encounter with US president Donald Trump in March.
On June 25, Zelensky was pictured at a pre-NATO summit dinner wearing a black jacket, shirt, and trouser combination with military-style detailing that multiple news outlets—including the BBC and the New York Post—described as a suit. Posts to a Polymarket-affiliated X account and the national Ukraine Instagram page even referred to it as a suit. Yet the Polymarket bet is poised to be resolved to the contrary, leading to an outcry among those who stand to lose their stake.
The discrepancy comes down partly to a dispute over the definition of a suit. “It meets the technical definition,” menswear expert Derek Guy tells WIRED. “I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.”
But more than that, the bet has become a test case for the efficacy and reliability of Polymarket’s model for crowdsourcing truth. In the event of a dispute, the platform lets holders of a certain crypto token cast votes on the answer. That may work for bets with binary outcomes—a team wins a game or it doesn’t—but invites chaos when many millions of dollars are on the line over more subjective topics, like what constitutes a suit. (“That’s a very weird system,” Guy says.)
Before a prediction market is resolved, Polymarket gives users a two-hour window in which they can lodge a dispute by posting a $750 bond. If a dispute is registered, it falls to Polymarket’s “oracle,” a decentralized financial contracts platform called Universal Market Access (UMA), to vote on a resolution. UMA, which was founded in 2018 and operates independently from Polymarket, resolves these disputes by allowing people or organizations that hold its tokens to vote on what the truth is.
In this case, UMA voters are saying by a seemingly insurmountable margin that Zelensky did not wear a suit.
The problem with such a system, critics claim, is that it’s vulnerable to abuse by so-called whales—holders of large amounts of tokens with an outsized influence over decisions. To avoid having to wade into every Polymarket dispute or otherwise incur a financial penalty for missing a vote, smaller UMA holders frequently loan their tokens to delegates who vote on their behalf, further concentrating the supply. According to data platform Sentora, 95 percent of UMA tokens are controlled by whales. “It’s not decentralized—nowhere near decentralized,” says an independent crypto trader who goes by the username defipolice, who stands to lose roughly $30,000 on his Zelensky bet.