Polymarket logged 600 million dollars in post-result election trades

Wired has reported that two global election markets on Polymarket generated over 600 million dollars in trading volume, with the majority of activity concentrated on losing candidates in contests whose outcomes were no longer in doubt.

In Ethiopia's federal election, Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party won 438 parliamentary seats. On Polymarket, just 173,000 dollars was wagered on Ahmed winning. More than 41 million dollars traded on his chief of staff, Shimelis Abdisa, becoming the country's next leader. Total volume in the market exceeded 285 million dollars, nearly all of it on candidates who lost.

Former Polymarket trader Chris Park, who now runs forensic analysis firm MSR Decode, found that roughly 284 million dollars of that volume came from pairs of accounts repeatedly buying and selling with each other. Barnard College economics professor Rajiv Sethi described the pattern as "obviously some form of volume manipulation."

Polymarket's head of global intelligence and investigations, Shana Bautista, told Wired the team "immediately flagged this activity, investigated, and blocked the accounts from trading." The platform did not respond to questions about why accounts were permitted to reach that volume before action was taken.