Polymarket is in hot water, but is it really all doom and gloom?

​The decentralized platform for predictive markets and betting, Polymarket, has found itself in a limelight— for all the wrong reasons.

On March 26, Wu Blockchain published a tweet on platform X, noting that Polymarket had been subjected to a governance attack involving a whale who allegedly spent millions of UMA tokens to influence the outcome of a bet regarding the signing of an agreement between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Under this agreement, Ukraine would commit to transferring a portion of its revenues from the extraction of rare and strategic mineral resources to the U.S.

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This story caused a backlash. Some members of the community started questioning whether whales now control the outcomes of global events, raising doubts about the platform's future.

The scandal in a nutshell

The whole issue revolves around the deal's signing date. It was initially planned for early February when U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. During this visit, he presented the document to President Zelensky. According to media reports, he demanded that the agreement be signed immediately, which the Ukrainian leadership did not agree to.

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After Zelenskyy rejected the initial proposal, Ukrainian and U.S. officials worked hard to reach a consensus.  The final version of the agreement was ready for signing in Washington on February 28, when Zelensky arrived at the White House for a meeting with the Trump administration. However, contrary to initial expectations, the visit turned into a public spat between Zelensky, Trump, and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance.

As a result, the Ukrainian delegation was asked to leave the White House, effectively derailing the signing of the second draft of the agreement. However, both Kyiv and Washington later tried to smooth over the disagreements and tone down the negotiations.

While the agreement remained in limbo for some time, it didn’t stop bets from pouring in, totaling over $7 million, most of which predicted that the agreement would not be signed before April.

Enter the scandal.

On March 25, Trump stated that he expected the agreement to be "signed soon," which apparently was enough to influence the outcome of the whale-driven bet. This wealthy individual invested 5 million UMA tokens across three accounts, amounting to 25% of the total votes.

The public outrage followed shortly, with many traders expressing dissatisfaction that the outcome of the bet had been determined despite the lack of any official announcement about the signing of the agreement.

"This is a joke. Zelensky just said that they are considering a bigger deal. That means the deal doesn’t exist — outright fraud," wrote one Polymarket user.

At the same time, another user wrote, "If this continues, whoever holds the most UMA in 2028 will decide who the next U.S. president will be. Polymarket will become a laughingstock."

As of the writing of this article, the agreement has yet to be signed.

"We have submitted the completed document for economic partnership; it is now under review by the Ukrainian side, and we hope to move forward with broad discussions, and perhaps sign it next week," emphasized Bessent in a Fox News interview on March 26. He added that the new version of the document is much more extensive than the original four-page agreement.

In addition, according to media reports, the new draft includes a number of new conditions and requirements, many of which are likely to conflict with Kyiv's interests. This is why it is expected that prolonged discussions and compromises will follow.

Still trending

Despite the dissatisfaction and talk of potential legal actions against the company, the platform’s popularity seems intact.

Not least because the platform apologized for the incident and promised to prevent similar attempts in the future.

"We are aware of the situation regarding the Ukraine rare earth metals market. This market resolved against user expectations and recommendations. Unfortunately, since this wasn’t a market failure, we cannot offer refunds," wrote a Polymarket representative after the scandal erupted.

Additionally, the platform continues to offer users a wide variety of exciting betting options across many domains.

In 2025, the most attractive betting options for those looking to place bets include sporting events such as the NFL Draft 2025, the Champions League, and the NBA Championship, which attract significant attention and a good number of bets.

Cryptocurrency forecasts are also among the most popular bets. This particularly concerns Bitcoin, whose movements are closely monitored by participants. Users are placing bets on Bitcoin’s price, especially trying to predict whether it will reach $120,000 or instead drop to $70,000 by the end of 2025.

Users are also trying to predict whether the U.S. will launch a controversial Bitcoin reserve in 2025, a project actively promoted by the Trump administration. According to the site, 72% of the bets support this possibility. The transaction volume for this bet is $2 million.

Many of the bets concern hot topics, such as Signal-gate — a group chat created by Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, which included almost the entire Trump cabinet and contained confidential information about strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.

One bet involves whether U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was part of the group, will leave his post before July.

At the time of writing, 12% of participants bet "Yes."

Other examples of interesting bets on similar topics include assessing the likelihood that Russian leader Vladimir Putin will leave office or whether there will be a ceasefire in Ukraine. The likelihood of the latter, as of late March, is just 1%, according to Polymarket.

Additionally, the likelihood of the second coming of Jesus Christ in 2025 is only 3%, according to user assessments.

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Moreover, during this time, users have attempted to predict whether nuclear weapons will be used before 2025, who will become the leading supplier of AI models, and who will have the largest market capitalization by December 31, 2025. Companies like NVIDIA and Apple are leading contenders.

So, it’s too early to say that the platform has suffered significant damage, especially considering that as of February 2025, its website saw around 8.6 million visits. Nothing indicates that this number will decrease significantly in the near future.