Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Launched in 2020, Polymarket rose to prominence<\/a> last year as a way for people to bet on the outcome of the US presidential election. During the election cycle, Polymarket and its advocates pitched prediction markets<\/a> as a superior method for predicting outcomes than traditional polling\u2014as a more efficient \u201csource of truth.<\/a>\u201d But that proposition has been challenged by the Zelensky suit debacle.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody knows the answer, but the system is currently broken,\u201d claims defipolice. \u201cIt\u2019s a fucked-up situation.\u201d<\/p>\n Polymarket does reserve the right to overturn a UMA outcome. Last year, the company overruled UMA voting<\/a> on a wager over whether Barron Trump was involved in a Trump-themed cryptocurrency project. At the time, Polymarket refunded bettors<\/a> and explicitly described UMA\u2019s conclusion as \u201cwrong.\u201d The company hasn\u2019t stepped in every time, though. In March, a $7 million bet over whether Ukraine and the United States would reach a deal on mineral access was prematurely resolved<\/a> with the wrong result. At the time, in a Discord message addressed to affected users, a Polymarket employee called it an \u201cunprecedented situation\u201d<\/a> but said that it would not refund bettors.<\/p>\n Polymarket users aggrieved by the likely outcome of the Zelensky prediction market are gathering on messaging platform Discord to coordinate a response, potentially including pursuing a lawsuit against Polymarket and UMA, they claim.<\/p>\n \u201cI do intend to join the lawsuit,\u201d says a Polymarket bettor by the username Adversary, who at one stage stood to win $300,000 on their bet, before they pulled out some funds in response to the confusion. \u201cI have experienced moral damages over this debacle, and the added context has caused me a great amount of stress.\u201d<\/p>\n People in UMA\u2019s Discord channel are similarly riled by the controversy, with community members accusing each other of \u201cbackchannel deals\u201d and scams. Some view it as an unflattering referendum on the entire project. \u201cThis isn\u2019t just a vote on a suit\u2014it\u2019s the vote on the future of UMA,\u201d one member wrote.<\/p>\n The final resolution is expected by the evening of July 8. The cofounder of UMA, Hart Lumbur, says the organization is planning to make adjustments to the dispute resolution process in light of the Zelensky suit controversy, but rejects the allegation that the vote has been manipulated in any way.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no evidence of manipulation of UMA. I really don\u2019t like those meritless accusations,\u201d Lambur tells WIRED. \u201cAfter the dust settles on this suit-or-not market, I\u2019m looking forward to having a productive conversation about improvements and design trade-offs.\u201d<\/p>\n Others see this kind of disagreement as a natural part of the process: \u201cFor me this was a jacket that looked like a suit but wasn\u2019t a suit,\u201d says Lancelot Chardonnet, who voted as a delegate on behalf of the UMA.rocks token pool, which controls around 0.1 percent of the total supply. \u201cThis controversy simply reflects that the truth is complex and differs from one person to another.\u201d<\/p>\n