Polymarket’s Morality: Trading, Value Extracting, or Literal Gambling?

The sheer amount of degeneracy of crypto people often peaks to a level where emotions, morals, ethics, and standards do not seem to be a real thing. The idea of Polymarket, the trendsetting prediction market platform, is not as degen as the dramatic intro line but it surely is a topic we can elaborate onto for its positioning. 

While it’s not the first decentralized prediction market platform, Polymarket kicked-off a new catalyst in the finance landscape.  

The launch and take-off of Polymarket 

Polymarket was launched in 2020 by Shayne Coplan. While crypto traders were busy tracking and trading Bitcoin’s rise to new highs throughout 2020 and 2021, Polymarket was stepping up to become a product-market-fit. Fast forward to today, it has nearly 80k active users and over 1.2 million count in daily transactions. 

The dramatic surge in platform activity occurred vastly during the fourth quarter of 2025 and the start of 2026 with several viral events taking over the internet. Some of those events include the explosive betting on post-election political shifts, controversial geopolitical outcomes like the Israel-Gaza scuffle, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and high-profile insider trading allegations that sparked global scrutiny. This frenzy not only drove record trading volumes but also thrust Polymarket back into regulatory crosshairs. This shift highlighted the platform’s role in turning sensitive real-world developments into high-stakes spectacles. 

Read Polymarket: Inside Shayne Coplan’s $8 Billion Prediction Empire, if you are not familiar with the topic. 

What sets Polymarket apart in the crowd is its unapologetic embrace of crypto’s debatable nature of borderless and often unregulated ethos. It allows users worldwide to wager on everything from election winners to military interventions without the oversight that plagues traditional betting platforms. 

This freedom fueled its post-2024 election boom, where it outperformed polls and became a media darling, only to face backlash as bets on wars, arrests, and even religious events raised eyebrows about exploitation and manipulation. As activity sustained into 2025 and beyond, the platform solidified its position, but at the cost of intensifying debates over its societal impact. 

Such attention led Polymarket to winding down its presence in the U.S. after the Commodity and Futures Commission (CFTC) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) accused it for running an illegal exchange. Though it is planning to make a comeback in the country after CFTC’s greenlight under the guidance of the new crypto-friendly government.  

A new “PumpFun” in town 

Despite not being available in its hometown to the U.S. users, Polymarket made a wave of trend, echoing that of PumpFun. In fact, PumpFun was at the same place where Polymarket is now. And if we look closely, both these platforms share the market dynamics. First one was used to speculate on any memecoin’s future outlook while the former one is focused on real-world events. Ultimately, the goal is to pocket a hefty amount of profits while predicting the potential favorable future outcome. 

If you are more of a crypto twitter person, you might have noticed that most KOLs—infamous for shape-shifting their personalities in accordance to trending narratives—are sharing content centered on Polymarket. Earlier, it was Hyperliquid and PumpFun throughout 2023 and early 2024. In its prime days, PumpFun was the talk of the town and it single handedly led Solana’s network activity to highest marks. 

However, Polymarket is launched on Polygon (formerly known as Matic) and due to its distinctive approach for fee structure, off-chain trade settlements, and UMA-based governance, majority of the activity does not reflect any growth on the blockchain. 

My momentary experience on Polymarket

For the sake of this opinion piece, I tried to get my hands on the platform and I found the onboarding process quite easy but it would surely confuse people who are new to crypto. I betted a couple of dollars on Elon Musk’s daily tweet count and Bitcoin’s 15 minutes price speculation (though I lost it all). 

Not to mention, Polymarket felt a little bit glitchy, but we know it is a standard for every other crypto website. While exploring all the events on the platform, I asked myself a question, do users really like this kind of trading? And a ‘degen voice’ inside my head answered “definitely I would do, and it’s not trading, it’s pure gambling.” 

There are also some events, which are not even gambling, it’s just pure degening: one of them is “Will Jesus Christ Return This Year?” If chances for this event collectively reaches even 50%, we should be worried about our sins. lol 

My key takeaway from a few hours of trading is that no matter what, if the thing makes them money, crypto people will rush to give it a try. And most of them will also be ready to lose a significant amount of their account just to experience the thrill and fuel their ‘FAFO’ motto. 

Polymarket core: Anonymity, outcomes, and profits

At the heart of Polymarket’s allure is its pseudo-anonymity. It’s a core feature of crypto that lets degens dive in without handing over their personal information. Sure, the platform officially geo-blocked certain countries and frowns on VPNs in the fine print, but let’s be real: a quick hop through a server in some permissive jurisdiction, and you’re in. 

This veil of anonymity isn’t just convenience; it’s rocket fuel for the wildest behavior, where whales can dump millions on sensitive outcomes without anyone knowing if it’s insider info or just a lucky hunch. Such bets on Polymarket have turned the whole thing into a shadowy playground where accountability is as rare as a rug pull that doesn’t happen. 

Then come the outcomes, resolved through this quirky UMA oracle system that’s supposed to be decentralized truth-seeking but often feels like a whale’s whim dictating reality. When the timeline for an event ends, disputes get voted on by UMA token holders, and history shows it’s ripe for controversy. Those are alleged for market flippings on technicalities, resolving geopolitical bets in ways that scream manipulation, and leaving losers raging about “scams” while winners cash out fat stacks. 

While not in all cases, it’s not clean arbitration; it’s crypto governance at its messiest, where profit motives twist the “truth” into whatever benefits the big holders. Often, disputes have arisen between users and the platform, when outcomes do not favor retail and their rage leads to nowhere. Why? Because it’s “decentralized” and decided through “governance.”  

Addressing insiders on Polymarket

Trading and insider-trading, both the words are increasingly used with the same meaning, especially in crypto; and even more especially on Polymarket. When insider trading is combined with geopolitical events, you get the big picture. 

The most recent example was set during the capture of Nicolás Maduro by the U.S. government. Hours before Trump officially announced the happening, a trader already put $30,000 on Maduro’s exit from Venezuela and they profited a healthy amount of $400,000 on this outcome. Just by reading the news, anyone can conclude that this trader must have the insider information, and since it was a state-backed operation, one must know how confidential it would have been. 

By far, Polymarket has made it only easy to chase fortune for those who always wanted to make big-fat-money and has connections to warmongers, military personnels, and leaders possessing power to have impact over, if not global, national spheres. 

These claims are not new and have already gained attention but no such actions have been taken, it’s an alien concept for even the government after all. Whales with suspiciously perfect track records, like the infamous “ricosuave666” boasting 100% wins on Israeli military ops and raking in over $150k, operate unchecked in this Wild West of wagering. 

Many such examples are there who are turning global tensions into personal profit machines for the connected few, leaving retail degens to foot the bill on manipulated markets. 

How developers are exploiting the platform?

In the world run by code only, no one can outsmart coders. 

If insiders were not enough, there are now developers who are exploiting the mechanics of Polymarket and amassing small but gradual profits. Since Polymarket is open-source and various tools and APIs available to directly connect with the platform’s backend, developers would not be shy to experiment with it.

A number of X posts note that programmers (call them coders or developers, all the same thing) are actively exploiting functionalities on Polymarket and profiting from either outcome. 

These code-crafters are deploying automated trading bots and scripts to extract value from the millions of dollars of trading volume. And it’s not even their smartness that is helping, but it’s their shenanigans like Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI tools. 

The philosophical POV 

At its core, Polymarket is not just a betting app, it’s an honest mirror held up in front of the true nature of crypto trading: one man’s loss is someone else’s profit. Exceptions aside, the whole of the crypto industry runs on the same principle.

The platform strips away the polite fiction that markets are about “information efficiency” and exposes the raw truth—most participants aren’t here for trading, they’re here to profit from chaos, tragedy, or someone else’s downfall. To add that, all while pretending it’s just “skin in the game.”

Zoom out, and Polymarket embodies the ultimate crypto nihilism: in a world where everything is probabilistic anyway, why not commodify reality itself? The degen does not ask if betting on geopolitical horror is ethical; he asks if the odds are mispriced, revealing how deeply we’ve internalized the idea that if something can be priced, it should be.

Speaking of philosophy, great grand philosophers like Aristotle and Nietzsche would recognize this instantly: we’re not rational truth-seekers aggregating wisdom; we’re dopamine-chasing primates who discovered a way to monetize schadenfreude and foresight porn. 

Final thoughts

The problem with the crypto industry is that we all want to make quick money but do not appreciate the technology. You will find thousands of traders who will say they hate crypto but still be buying useless coins the very next moment. It’s not developers and founders who are to blame for launching “get-rich-quick scheme” projects, but IT IS WHAT ACTUALLY PEOPLE WANT. 

Also read: Memecoins Are Financial Nihilism — And That’s the Point