Online betting on the fall of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela has highlighted the dramatic rise of prediction markets: portals where people bet on everything from sporting events to the Trump administration's next military strikes to the resurrection of Jesus. While some benefit greatly from it, others are concerned about the human and geopolitical repercussions in the real world.

Published on: 02/15/2026 - 1:57 p.m.

Only a handful of people in the world were aware of what was happening in the early hours of January 3 in Venezuela: a top-secret US military operation dubbed "Absolute Resolve." Carried out by air, land and sea, this two-hour and twenty-minute intervention resulted in the capture of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

However, a clue of what was going on had appeared a few hours earlier on the online platform Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market where anonymous users bet on real-world events.

The user 0x31a56e thus bet 32,537 dollars (27,413 euros) on the fact that Nicolas Maduro would be removed before the end of January, while the chances of this happening on the afternoon of January 2 were only 6.5%. By midnight, his chances had increased to 11%, and they increased further just before the operation was performed. This suspiciously-timed bet paid off: the anonymous user made a net profit of more than $436,000 in a single night. The account has since disappeared.

This strange incident thrust the growing but still relatively private online prediction market into the spotlight. On these platforms, users can bet on the outcome of a wide variety of future events, from the most common (who will win the Super Bowl?) to the most bizarre (Will Jesus resurrect in 2026?).

These companies claim that they are not gambling portals, but legitimate financial markets, a sort of hybrid between an exchange and a cryptocurrency platform, although some watchdogs disagree.

Anonymity guaranteed

Two players, Kalshi and Polymarket, have dominated this sector in recent years, experiencing growth that is both meteoric and discreet. Of the total volume of $44 billion in prediction markets in 2025, Kalshi and Polymarket together accounted for $38 billion.

Transactions carried out on these websites should not be confused with surveys, insists Shayne Coplan, the early founder of Polymarket, in an interview with the American news magazine 60 Minutes.

Shayne Coplan, who founded the company in 2020 when he was just 21, says Polymarket tries to predict actual outcomes: "You make money if you're right. You lose money if you're wrong. And that helps create useful information for people."

Some people have made big profits by making risky bets. This is the case of the user called “Domer” and who appears in the same 60 Minutes report. This former professional poker player turned to Polymarket because it was "more exciting." He made more than $100,000 predicting the election of an American pope, and even more after nominating JD Vance as Donald Trump's running mate for president. "Domer" took the opposite view of the predictions, because he thought that the American president liked names with only one syllable, because "he (Trump) is very focused on marketing".

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Even established media outlets like CNN and CNBC have made deals to incorporate Kalshi prediction markets into their news coverage. However, these online betting sites are not free from criticism. Polymarket, in particular, has been the subject of controversy due to its cryptocurrency and blockchain-based architecture.

Users such as 0x31a56e, who predicted Maduro's capture, can transact anonymously, without being traced. While a stroke of luck is always possible, analysts tend to lean toward people with inside information. But on this kind of platforms, it's impossible to get the end of the story.

It is for this reason that in most European countries, where a disparate set of rules must be respected, Polymarket is neither legal nor easily accessible. Some countries consider them gambling, and those that don't still require a license. Regulators are wary, and rightly so. Under Joe Biden, prediction markets were also heavily regulated but under the Trump presidency, these sites have benefited greatly from the deregulation of the sector.

“Privatization of state secrets”

Critics of these platforms worry they are commercializing real-world events by encouraging people to bet on political, military and diplomatic events.

The capture of Nicolas Maduro is just one example of questionable trading on predictive markets. A few hours before the announcement of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado, a user bet thousands of dollars in her favor: the probability of a victory for the Venezuelan opponent increased in two hours from 3.75% to almost 73%, a scenario which prompted the Norwegian authorities to open an investigation.

Similarly, in early January, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt ended her briefing after 64 minutes and 30 seconds. Her hasty departure left traders perplexed, wondering whether Karoline Leavitt had deliberately stopped before the 65-minute mark in order to make a profit. Polymarket had a 98% prediction that the briefing would last more than 65 minutes.

According to Alex Goldenberg, an intelligence analyst and researcher at the Miller Center at Rutgers University, the signals are clear. "In all of these cases, a consistent pattern emerges: new accounts with no trading history take very strong and unlikely positions hours before these events occur. These are not gradual market movements reflecting evolving public information. They bear the hallmarks of insider trading in traditional financial markets."

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The goal of these predictive markets is to reward people with superior information—those who collect the right data and analyze it accurately. While there is nothing wrong with this a priori, the line between analysis and privileged information remains very thin, says the expert.

"Apply this logic to areas governed by defense secrecy: military operations, covert actions, diplomatic negotiations. In these areas, 'privileged information' means access to classified or non-public knowledge. The architecture of the platform does not distinguish between a well-informed analyst and a person with a security clearance who has just left a briefing," explains Alex Goldenberg.

The opacity surrounding predictive markets can also pose serious problems for national security.

One account, initially named RicoSauve666 and then Rundeep, bet on several operations linked to Israeli military action with extremely consistent results. The Israel Defense Forces and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) eventually opened an investigation into this user.

“The high-conviction, low-probability transactions we observed before the Venezuela operation and the Israeli strikes bear the hallmark of someone having access to information and monetizing it,” describes Alex Goldenberg. "This is privatization of state secrets. Diplomats, military personnel, intelligence analysts, contractors and anyone working in national security now have the ability to monetize sensitive, non-public information for personal gain."

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And dangerous biases can appear when a result is presumed to be a foregone conclusion. Alex Goldenberg discusses a hypothetical: "Suppose the United States is preparing to conduct an operation against Iran and several high-conviction, low-probability bets suddenly appear in a prediction market indicating that this will happen tomorrow. You have potentially given an adversary advance notice of an operation through publicly visible market activity."

“An adversary who bets big on very specific military results can also create a situation where we wonder if anyone knows anything. This is enough to sow confusion and distort decision-making,” concludes the expert.

This risk is much greater on platforms using cryptocurrencies such as Polymarket, where transactions take place anonymously, often in offshore jurisdictions.

“Who is leading the investigation? Which jurisdiction has jurisdiction?” asks Alex Goldenberg. “Today, the culprits cannot be arrested. Several countries, including France, have already concluded that these platforms cannot be adequately regulated and have banned them altogether.”

There is also the important question of who runs the market itself: the US president's son, Donald Trump Jr., is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket. His venture capital firm 1789 invested an undisclosed amount "tens of millions of dollars" in Polymarket in 2025.

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Its founder sees this in a positive light: "This administration is very supportive of innovation, cryptocurrency and Polymarket, which is great... I'm a young entrepreneur. If I can count on people who believe in what I'm doing, who understand how politics works and who can help me... there's nothing wrong with that."

Separately, Trump Media and Technology Group, owner of the president's social media platform, Truth Social, announced the launch of its own platform, Truth Predict.

“This fundamentally changes the civic discourse. Instead of asking ourselves 'should we strike', which is a moral and strategic question, we ask ourselves 'what are the chances that we will strike,' says Alex Goldenberg. 'We have taken events with real human consequences and transformed them into financial instruments like any other. This normalization deserves attention.”

Article adapted from English by Grégoire Sauvage. The original can be found here.

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