Polymarket saw $600 million in election trades after the elections were over

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Prediction market boosters often tout the platforms as barometers of public opinion, or even “truth machines” offering a clearer picture of where things are headed than polling or other data. In 2024, for example, Kalshi beat many pollsters in forecasting the outcome of the US presidential race. But their trading activity can also tell more perplexing stories.

预测市场的支持者经常吹捧这些平台是舆论的晴雨表，甚至是比民意调查或其他数据更能清晰反映未来走向的“真理机器”。例如，在2024年，Kalshi在预测美国总统大选结果方面击败了许多民调机构。但它们的交易活动也可能讲述一些更令人困惑的故事。

Two global election markets on Polymarket’s offshore platform, for instance, generated over $600 million in trading volume, far more than most political markets typically attract. Most of the activity took place buying and selling contracts tied to long-shot candidates who ultimately did not win.

例如，Polymarket离岸平台上的两个全球选举市场产生了超过6亿美元的交易额，这远高于大多数政治市场通常吸引的资金量。大部分交易活动涉及买卖那些最终并未获胜的冷门候选人的合约。

This summer, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party cruised to victory in federal elections, winning 438 parliamentary seats and paving the way for him to serve another five-year term. The closest competitor won 13 seats. On prediction markets, trading volume—the total value of contracts bought and sold—typically tracks roughly with the odds of a given outcome; frontrunners attract far more volume than long shots.

今年夏天，埃塞俄比亚总理阿比·艾哈迈德领导的繁荣党在联邦选举中大获全胜，赢得了438个议会席位，为其连任五年铺平了道路。而竞争对手仅获得13个席位。在预测市场上，交易量（买卖合约的总价值）通常与特定结果的赔率大致挂钩；领先者吸引的交易量远多于冷门候选人。

But in this case, the trading patterns deviated sharply from the norm. Just $173,000 was wagered on Ahmed winning, compared to more than $41 million traded on his chief of staff, Shimelis Abdisa, becoming the country’s next leader. Altogether, the volume traded added up to over $285 million, nearly all on losing candidates.

但在这种情况下，交易模式严重偏离了常态。押注艾哈迈德获胜的金额仅为17.3万美元，而押注其幕僚长希梅利斯·阿布迪萨成为该国下一任领导人的交易额却超过了4100万美元。总计交易额超过2.85亿美元，几乎全部集中在落败的候选人身上。

Even odder? “Nearly all of it—about $284 million—came from pairs of accounts repeatedly buying and selling with each other,” says former Polymarket trader Chris Park, who now runs the prediction-market forensic analysis firm MSR Decode. Such a high volume of seemingly pointless back-and-forth transactions has raised eyebrows among experts.

更奇怪的是什么？前Polymarket交易员、现经营预测市场取证分析公司MSR Decode的克里斯·帕克表示：“几乎所有的交易额——约2.84亿美元——都来自成对账户之间的反复买卖。”如此大规模看似毫无意义的来回交易引起了专家的质疑。

“It’s obviously some form of volume manipulation,” says Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economics professor who researches prediction markets. When asked about these markets, Shana Bautista, Polymarket’s head of global intelligence and investigations, told WIRED that the team “immediately flagged this activity, investigated, and blocked the accounts from trading.” Polymarket did not respond to follow-up questions about why the accounts were able to trade such a high amount of volume before it took action.

巴纳德学院研究预测市场的经济学教授拉吉夫·塞西表示：“这显然是某种形式的交易量操纵。”当被问及这些市场时，Polymarket全球情报与调查主管莎娜·包蒂斯塔告诉《连线》杂志，团队“立即标记了这一活动，进行了调查，并封禁了这些账户的交易权限”。对于为何这些账户在采取行动前能够进行如此大额的交易，Polymarket没有回应后续提问。

The timing of these trades made things even weirder. Polymarket’s rules stipulated that the Ethiopia market would be resolved in October after the prime minister was formally appointed and sworn in, which meant that it stayed open for several months after Ahmed’s victory was all but a foregone conclusion. For 123 days after the election, bursts of seemingly irrational trading continued, prompting Polymarket users to leave comments like “THIS NOT RESOLVED?” and “fuckkkk.”

这些交易的时间点让事情变得更加诡异。Polymarket的规则规定，埃塞俄比亚市场将在总理正式任命并宣誓就职后的10月结算，这意味着在艾哈迈德胜选已成定局后，该市场仍开放了数月。选举后的123天里，看似非理性的交易持续爆发，促使Polymarket用户留下诸如“还没结算吗？”和“该死”之类的评论。

Sethi calls the phenomenon a “zombie market,” where people can buy and trade on events that have already taken place or are no longer happening. Another market about a 2024 election in Romania facilitated what Sethi described as “even more dramatic” trading anomalies. The initial election was called off due to fears about foreign interference. A new race was held several months later, but instead of closing the original market in the meantime, Polymarket kept it running alongside the new option.

塞西将这种现象称为“僵尸市场”，即人们可以针对已经发生或不再发生的事情进行买卖交易。另一个关于2024年罗马尼亚选举的市场出现了塞西所描述的“更具戏剧性”的交易异常。最初的选举因担心外国干预而被取消。几个月后举行了新的选举，但Polymarket并没有在此期间关闭原始市场，而是让它与新选项同时运行。

It was during this period that Sethi first noticed something weird appeared to be happening with the older market. An algorithm Sethi and his colleagues created to flag potential wash trading on Polymarket identified nearly all of the volume as suspicious. “99.6 percent of volume in this market for certain weeks has been wash trading,” Sethi says.

正是在这段时间里，塞西首次注意到旧市场似乎出现了异常。塞西及其同事为标记Polymarket上潜在的洗售交易而创建的算法显示，几乎所有的交易量都是可疑的。塞西说：“在某些周，该市场99.6%的交易量都是洗售交易。”

Wash trading is a type of market manipulation in which accounts repeatedly buy and sell assets to create the illusion of heavy交易 activity, when in reality, money is simply moving back and forth. It’s banned on regulated financial exchanges in the United States and is specifically prohibited in Polymarket’s terms of service. An earlier study conducted by Sethi and colleagues found evidence of widespread wash trading on Polymarket’s offshore platform.

洗售交易是一种市场操纵行为，账户通过反复买卖资产来制造交易活跃的假象，而实际上资金只是在来回移动。这种行为在美国受监管的金融交易所是被禁止的，在Polymarket的服务条款中也明确禁止。塞西及其同事之前的一项研究发现了Polymarket离岸平台上存在广泛洗售交易的证据。

Wash trading could explain what happened with the Ethiopian and Romanian political markets, but because the identities of the traders is unknown, uncertainty remains. “What appears to be wash trading isn’t always wash trading,” says Sethi. MSR Decode ran an analysis of the Ethiopian market for WIRED, which found that the most likely explanation for the anomalous trading is “activity farming,” which is when people try to artificially inflate their trading volumes.

洗售交易或许能解释埃塞俄比亚和罗马尼亚政治市场发生的情况，但由于交易者身份不明，仍存在不确定性。塞西说：“看起来是洗售交易的，并不一定总是洗售交易。”MSR Decode为《连线》杂志对埃塞俄比亚市场进行了分析，发现这种异常交易最可能的解释是“活动刷量”，即人们试图人为地夸大交易量。

The firm suspects that traders may have been interested in boosting their volume because they believed that they could benefit if Polymarket launched a cryptocurrency token. In 2025, Polymarket chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber told the hosts of a crypto-themed podcast that there “would be a token” but did not provide specifics. Sethi also finds it plausible that traders could be motivated by potential “token allocation” to higher-volume accounts.

该公司怀疑交易者可能热衷于提高交易量，因为他们认为如果Polymarket发行加密货币代币，他们就能从中获益。2025年，Polymarket首席营销官马修·莫达伯在参加一个加密主题播客时表示“会有代币”，但未提供具体细节。塞西也认为，交易者可能受到高交易量账户潜在“代币分配”的激励，这种可能性是存在的。

This type of behavior has been observed before in the cryptocurrency industry. “These are textbook examples on how market participants farm a potential airdrop,” says Andre Guettler, the director of Ulm University’s Institute of Strategic Management and Finance, who researches the structure of prediction markets.

这种行为在加密货币行业早有先例。乌尔姆大学战略管理与金融研究所所长、研究预测市场结构的安德烈·格特勒表示：“这些是市场参与者如何刷取潜在空投的教科书式案例。”

When MSR Decode analyzed the Ethiopian election market, it found that it was highly unlikely that the trading volume could be attributed to sophisticated traders using algorithms to eke out profits. It analyzed over 38,000 “trade loops” that took place after the election (instances where individual wallets bought and sold to each other in quick succession) and found that over 98 percent resulted in neither side losing or gaining money. The median time that the accounts held onto the contracts they purchased before selling them again was nine seconds.

当MSR Decode分析埃塞俄比亚选举市场时，发现这些交易量极不可能是由使用算法赚取利润的成熟交易者所为。他们分析了选举后发生的超过38,000个“交易循环”（即个人钱包在短时间内相互买卖的情况），发现超过98%的交易双方都没有盈亏。账户持有合约并在再次卖出前的中位时间仅为9秒。