Two election markets on Polymarket’s offshore platform generated more than 600 million dollars in combined trading volume, most of it after the outcomes were known, according to a WIRED investigation reported by Ars Technica. A platform check on October 16 put the two contracts’ combined lifetime volume at 657.8 million dollars, with the Ethiopia contract at 286.0 million dollars and the older Romania contract at 371.8 million dollars.
The Ethiopia market is the extreme case. Prime minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party won 438 parliamentary seats against 13 for its closest competitor, yet only 173,000 dollars was traded on Ahmed winning, while more than 41 million dollars traded on his chief of staff. Former Polymarket trader Chris Park of MSR Decode said about 284 million dollars of the Ethiopia volume came from pairs of accounts repeatedly buying and selling with each other, across more than 38,000 post election trade loops in which more than 98 percent left neither side with a gain or loss and the median holding time was nine seconds. Trading bursts continued for 123 days after the vote.
For the Romania contract, Barnard College economist Rajiv Sethi said an algorithm flagged 99.6 percent of volume as wash trading during certain weeks, while cautioning that what appears to be wash trading is not always wash trading, and the analysis does not establish who controlled the accounts or why they traded. Polymarket blocked the accounts involved but has not explained the activity, a gap that matters because the platform’s volume figures are widely cited as a measure of public belief.