Overview
- An anonymous Polymarket account turned roughly $32,500 into more than $436,000 by betting on Nicolás Maduro’s removal shortly before President Trump announced the capture.
- Polymarket odds on Maduro’s exit jumped from about 6.5% to double digits late on January 2 and surged in the early hours of January 3, just ahead of the public announcement.
- Chainalysis said the trader withdrew the proceeds in Solana through a major American exchange with no apparent effort to conceal the funds.
- Rep. Ritchie Torres introduced a bill to bar government employees from betting when they hold material nonpublic information and to explicitly criminalize such conduct on prediction platforms.
- The episode intensifies scrutiny of lightly regulated prediction markets, even as Polymarket touts recent CFTC approval to operate in the U.S.; regulators have not announced any enforcement actions.