Introduction: Gradually Then Suddenly

When we began publishing BetBreakingNews in September 2025, the idea that geopolitical prediction markets posed structural national security risks was still niche. When we were invited to speak at the McCain Institute earlier this year, many senior national security professionals openly acknowledged this was a new domain of thought for them.

Then came the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and the resulting speculation that an insider who knew the attacks were going to happen profited off of that classified information.

That episode became the first true mainstream inflection point. Media outlets and policymakers began treating prediction markets not as curiosities, but as potential insider-threat and national security vectors.

Rep. Ritchie Torres introduced legislation aimed at restricting insider trading by members of Congress and executive branch officials on prediction platforms. Six senators led by Adam Schiff called for banning contracts “involving deaths.” During the same period, thoughtful analyses by Alex Goldenberg and Matthew Wein further mapped how war-focused markets could be weaponized and explored regulatory responses.

However, the true dawn of Betting Intelligence (BETINT) where media, policymakers, and the public turned to prediction markets as a primary source for geopolitical tracking arrived with the buildup and anticipation of a U.S. strike on Iran.

Chart via internal systems showing Iran strike markets. Size of the data bubble denotes the size of the bet placed. Note times in UTC (6AM UTC = 1AM ET)

For weeks, traders and observers watched markets asking whether and when the United States would act. Prices oscillated through multiple false starts. Then, around 11:30PM EST the evening before the strike, relevant Iran markets began climbing sharply. Public confirmation did not begin circulating until approximately 1:15AM on February 28.

That 90+ minute window marked a paradigm shift: market participants held the information long before newsrooms did. Yet, the ensuing commentary remained reductionist, centering primarily on two questions: “Who were the insiders?” and “Are these markets a net positive or negative?” (though let us compliment Aaron Courtney’s thorough layout of those elements and Rajiv Sethi’s look into how these markets treat the idea of profiting off of violence). These are necessary questions but there is even more to talk about with the market information.

These markets revealed far more than potential insider activity. They provided structured, time-stamped, incentive-layered data about expectations, positioning, and second-order risks. What we hope to do with this paper is provide a primer for decision makers who want to move toward disciplined interpretation of this data source.

What follows is a primer on the core operating principles of Betting Intelligence (BETINT). These are the foundational lenses we use when interpreting prediction markets in real-world crises.

Each principle can be read independently. Taken together, they form the early architecture of a broader research agenda - one that treats markets as structured, incentive-layered intelligence systems.

1. Start With the Question, Not the Data

Jumping into prediction market data without a clearly defined goal is a fundamental analytic error. Like any scientific or intelligence enterprise, Betting Intelligence (BETINT) requires a structured starting point. With tens of thousands of non-sports event contracts now live across various platforms, an analyst without a hypothesis will quickly drown in noise. Without a specific threat model or a clear understanding of your organizational exposure, the data is just a Rorschach test where you will simply see what you want to see.

Not every decision-maker cares about the same signals. If you are at FinCEN or the DOJ, your focus may be on insider identification and prosecution. If you are in the petroleum industry, you are likely searching for early indicators of kinetic events that move crude prices. If you are in defense, you may care more about operational timing and cascading retaliation, while a finance lead might prioritize volatility transmission across asset classes.

Different questions require different tradecraft. One field to turn to for possibilities is how intelligence professionals utilize structured analytical techniques like the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) to remain objective. For example, if a single wallet wins $3 million on a geopolitical strike, you must weigh competing explanations: was it genuine insider knowledge, or was it a result of high-conviction open-source analysis, simple luck, wash trading, or even “signal jamming” (which we talk about more in later sections)?

By defining your hypotheses and the criteria for confirming them before touching the data, you avoid the lazy analysis of assuming every big winner is a mole. Other intelligence analysis methodologies and decision analysis tools can then be used to confirm or deny these theories but what matters is that you define hypotheses, classification criteria, and potential response actions before you immerse yourself in the data. Define the hypotheses first; only then do you collect the data.

2. Read the Rules. Every Word.

Market wording can be identical across platforms while tracking fundamentally different risks. The “Will Ayatollah Khamenei leave office?” contracts illustrate this: Polymarket allowed resolution via death, while Kalshi explicitly excluded it to avoid being classified as an “assassination market“. Because bettors prioritize profit, a Kalshi trader will not price in a kinetic resolution if the platform won’t pay out for it. Consequently, you cannot treat the data from these two platforms as a 1-to-1 comparison of the same reality.

And since we are on the subject of semantics, ambiguous wording creates both analytical distortion and legal exposure. This ambiguity creates incongruity of interpretation as different traders may connote the same contract differently. We foresee a future where specialized litigators exploit these linguistic loopholes for class action lawsuits. Controversial resolutions (like those surrounding Zelensky’s attire or Cardi B’s Super Bowl “performance”) are precursors to class-action lawsuits. When lawyers begin hunting for semantic ambiguities, the threat of litigation will force platforms to tighten rules, but until then, the “fog of the rules” remains a primary analytical hurdle.

3. Poly-Pump Fakes & Alarm Fatigue

In the weeks leading up to the February 28th strike, the information environment was defined by a series of false starts. Since mid-January, media chatter and prediction market spikes repeatedly suggested an attack was imminent, only for the odds to sharply deflate.

This scenario opens up for a technique we’ve previously written about called the Poly-Pump Fake, a technique where an actor seeks to create a false consensus by leveraging multiple information sources to profit from the resulting market volatility. While we don’t have confirmation that this was a deliberate White House directive, the tactical utility of such a maneuver in a monetized reality is undeniable.

This iteration of the Poly-Pump Fake leverages the same mechanics we’ve previously analyzed but shifts its objective to repeatedly pump faking the audience until it is time to actually go through with the action. By repeatedly triggering the market “alarm” without an ensuing “strike,” an actor induces alarm fatigue which is a phenomenon where the sheer frequency of alerts causes observers to become desensitized. Much like healthcare workers who eventually ignore critical monitors due to constant false positives, bettors and analysts habituated to “false starts” become the perfect victims of strategic surprise.

The hypothetical Poly-Pump Fake in this scenario has some other interesting elements to consider:

• Narrative Weaponization: Repeated delays reinforced the “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out) narrative. Traders and analysts began to bake “inaction” into the price, assuming the administration was merely posturing about attacking.

• Tactical Stealth: When Operation Epic Fury finally launched, the initial market movement was met with skepticism. Retail traders and betting intelligence analysts, conditioned by previous pump fakes, hesitated to react thus widening the window of tactical surprise for operational actors on the ground.

By keeping volatility just below the threshold of serious attention, a sophisticated actor can “cry wolf” until the adversary and the market stops listening. Sometimes volatility can be the ultimate camouflage.

4. Timing Often Matters More Than The Odds

In the Iran strike markets, price movements told only part of the story. Timing told the rest. Around 11:30 PM EST on February 27th, we observed a clustering of heavy, high-conviction “Yes” bets.

Screenshot from our own internal tool showing the timing of the volume of # of traders and the money volume for these Iran strike markets.

In national security and supply chain security, a 90 minute window can provide the lead time necessary for:

• Asset Protection: Repositioning high-value personnel or hardening digital infrastructure against retaliatory cyberattacks.

• Information Maneuver: Preparing a pre-emptive counter-narrative or a “rally around the flag” message before the adversary can frame the strike.

• Operational Security: Identifying potential leaks by tracing the exact moment conviction entered the market relative to internal briefing cycles.

Remember that while the price/odds are likely the most important indicator for traders looking to profit, the “when” is usually much more important when it comes to actionable betting intelligence.

5. Don’t Ignore the Losing Side: Signal Jamming

A common analytical trap is focusing exclusively on the winning “Yes” bets. However, looking at the “losing” side is often more instructive for identifying counter-intelligence efforts and market manipulation.

During the Iran strike buildup, we noticed many big “No” bets coming in about 5 hours before the market resolved to “Yes” (see screenshot from the Intro section) and we tracked a single position of over $1.4 million betting “No” on an imminent strike (see picture above). In a vacuum, this looks like a trader making a massive, incorrect bet (which it may very well be) but in an intelligence context, it forced our team to consider that it could be a technique our team calls Signal Jamming.

Just as electronic warfare units jam radar to mask a physical advance, a sophisticated actor can place massive, counter-intuitive bets to disrupt the market signal. When a government or insider has foreknowledge of a resolution, they have a powerful incentive to defray and obfuscate the BETINT value that other “sharps” might be extracting. Signal Jamming intentionally loses capital by flooding the order book and driving the price away from the market result a group is intending to happen. This serves to:

• Mask Insiders: Dilute the impact of true insider “Yes” bets to prevent the price from moving too early and alerting adversaries.

• Create Narrative Confusion: Mislead OSINT analysts, newsrooms, and competitors into believing the strike has been called off.

• Economic Sabotage: Wipe out retail traders or opposing “sharks” who follow the “big money” into a trap.

We are only scratching the surface of this concept of signal jamming and we are considering making a longer article similar to our Poly-Pump Fake article to more fully explain it.

6. Not Every Insider is a Whale

When traders spot a suspiciously large position, the instinct is to assume the wallet belongs to an insider. However, the most sophisticated actors know how to hide their edge.

Polymarket’s most powerful differentiator from any betting platform that came before it is the fact that one person can have an unlimited amount of wallets linked to polymarket profiles. Practically, that means that a true insider could spread out their inside bet across 10, 50, 100+ wallets if they prioritize privacy which means a true insider can spread a million-dollar bet across hundreds of wallets. This is a form of insider trading that simple whale tracking systems are not built for but expect to see more “schools of minnow” in the near future after enough whales get caught.

Conversely, we must challenge the assumption that all insiders are high-net-worth oligarchs or executives. Insiders are often “everyday” individuals like a helicopter pilot, a low-level clerk, or a barracks technician who lack the capital to move the market but possess definitive operational knowledge.

Consider a servicemember who knows a strike is coming. They may not have $50,000 to wager, but they might deploy $500 through a cousin’s crypto wallet or a proxy account. While these “micro-bets” don’t shift the odds, they represent a significant moral and security failure. Betting that individuals will succumb to the “greed devil” is a more productive intelligence posture than assuming perfect institutional integrity.

7. Not Every Winner Is an Insider

While we have a proven track record of identifying genuine insider trading (see our work tracking the same insiders that led to Israeli authorities’ arresting IDF soldiers or the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) manipulated maps case), blanketly labeling every large winner an “insider” is lazy analysis.

The Iran strike scenario possessed a high Visibility Index, a composite metric we use to track open interest alongside media and social discourse frequency. High visibility naturally invites heavy retail participation and high-conviction “sharps” who synthesize open-source data more effectively than the average observer. When a scenario has weeks of mainstream buildup, the probability of “retail” being the primary driver increases.

Distinguishing between a lucky trader and a mole requires tradecraft that moves past basic blockchain tracing into behavioral profiling and attribution. To assess insider probability, we utilize a multi-variable assessment:

• Media Visibility Metrics: Does the trade timing correlate with media and public discourse spikes?

• Volume and Liquidity Depth: Did the trade “crash” the price or fill naturally within existing depth?

• Unique Trader Counts: Was the price moved by a “crowd” or a coordinated “cluster”?

• Cross-Platform Price Convergence: Do regulated and offshore prices align, or is one “leading” the other?

• Historical Performance: Does the wallet consistently “guess” correctly across unrelated geopolitical events?

While we are developing advanced attribution tools for our platform to map wallets to persons, the immediate lesson for the decision-maker is caution: market visibility often explains what looks like an “inside” edge.

8. Mapping Correlating Markets Before They Happen

A common mistake in interpreting prediction markets is treating each event as isolated rather than as a node in a network of cross-correlated markets. After the Iran strike, for example, correlated markets moved in the Strait of Hormuz, oil-linked contracts, Bitcoin pricing, and even how many times Elon Musk will tweet this week.

Serious BETINT practitioners should aim to pre-map likely second- and third-order markets before a primary event resolves. We are currently developing tools to identify and test cross-market correlations and causality where we overlay multiple layers: open interest, cross-platform pricing, media chatter, and historical response patterns. The resulting correlation maps highlight which markets are likely reactionary, which are predictive, and where anomalies suggest potential insider influence or strategic manipulation. By structuring these dependencies in advance, analysts move from reactive observation to predictive insight, translating raw market data into forward-looking intelligence.

9. New Market Creation Is Signal

Markets rarely appear randomly; they are typically timed around anticipated events, insider knowledge, or heightened public interest. When a new contract appears, the first analytical question must be “Why now?”.

Months ago, the “Will Israel attack Yemen?“ market appeared roughly one week before real-world operations began. The creation timestamp and the speed at which liquidity filled were indicators we paid attention to on top of when we started to see insider betting action.

“When” the markets are created will become even more critical with the rise of permissionless markets, which are platforms where any user (not just the prediction market operator) can deploy a question if they provide the liquidity. Polymarket developers have already alluded to this shift, and some traders have claimed early access. Suffice it to say that Polymarket offering permissionless markets would lead to the same kinds of threats mentioned in headlines about prediction markets coming to a neighborhood near you.

Polymarket currently does list the date each market is created, including different time horizons on the same event. Pay close attention to these timestamps as valuable data.

10. Account for the Cultural and Spiritual Artifacts

Human behavior often follows cultural logic and dates matter. The strike on Iran coincided with the Jewish holiday of Purim; North Korea launching intercontinental ballistic missiles on July 4th, and our team has noted that President Trump has frequently announced/conducted major initiatives on Fridays after the stock market has closed.

Rationality is culturally bounded and why people do certain actions or choose certain days to do something could be with a logic that is wrapped up in cultural or spiritual reasons and it is on the betting intelligence analyst to be aware of these elements to best model/predict what could happen. Ignoring these artifacts risks misreading signals (even if they are seen as “superstitious”), while incorporating them allows analysts to detect subtle cues embedded in price movements and emerging contracts.

11. Cross-Platform & Demographic Intelligence

Kalshi and Polymarket dominate English discourse, but platform ecosystems are fragmenting.

Users migrate based on incentives. Emerging platforms will cater to specific cultural, political, or demographic niches. Over time, attribution and demographic profiling will mature beyond self-reporting.

Future BETINT will involve:

• Cross-platform arbitrage analysis

• Demographic inference modeling

• Geographic wallet clustering

• Monitoring offshore and privacy-enhanced platforms

Each platform is a sensor. The closer the sensor is to the population you care about, the stronger the signal. Assuming today’s top prediction market platforms remain dominant is strategically naive.

Conclusion: As Dawn Breaks

The dawn of Betting Intelligence marks a fundamental shift in how information flows, decisions are made, and risks are assessed. Even two years ago, cable news was seen as the slower news source that people used to double check if something they saw online was real.

Today, prediction markets have become the primary source for real-time tracking, while online news sources are relegated to the role of lagging validators. For this shift to fully materialize, decision-makers and the public must become fluent in what Betting Intelligence can reveal.

This fluency is also a call for competency in seeing prediction markets for what they truly are in the context of geopolitics: a non-kinetic weapon. Experts in national security treat the information environment (which includes online social media) as a battlespace where wars are won or lost (see this paper by J.D. Maddox for an overview on this framing). In this frame, prediction markets act like a sniper’s laser scope; directing attention to specific actors, topics, or signals to extract information or leverage for profit. Today, these “scopes” focus on adversaries like Iran or China, but permissionless platforms will inevitably turn them inward. Imagine markets predicting when and where the next mass shooting or school shooting will occur in the U.S.; that’s a horrifying yet plausible future.

The ultimate trajectory of prediction markets is clear from Kalshi’s CEO: to “financialize everything.”

Much as the internet has absorbed all facets of information, prediction markets are poised to absorb reality itself. By developing fluency in Betting Intelligence, analysts, policymakers, and enterprise leaders can move from reactive observation to anticipatory insight, transforming raw market activity into actionable intelligence and, ultimately, a sharper understanding of the world before it unfolds. You reading this far is hopefully another step towards that better future.

Prediction markets were supposed to make the world smarter. The pitch was that by attaching real stakes to uncertain events, markets would reward those who sought truth, punish those who guessed, and when prediction markets scale up to the masses, they would produce an infrastructure of radical transparency.

We suspect that this was the thinking that these markets would foster an efficient, collective search for truth is what motivated partnerships that both CNN and CNBC now have with Kalshi.

However, this rose-colored pitch fails to account for the core mechanic of profit for prediction markets:

Prediction markets don’t reward truth; they reward those who shape the momentum of truth.

It doesn’t matter if what ends up being believed is the “truth” or not. Markets measure consensus; they do not measure the absolute truth.

We discussed in our previous work that as the U.S. economy begins to migrate from transactional purchases to purchasing probabilities (hypergamblification) and how there is a race for these companies to try to turn every conceptual category of life into a betting opportunity (what we called “monetized reality” but also encapsulated in Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour to “financialize everything”).

As this system overlays the economy, profound incentives appear. For traders, the profit motive dictates strategy: they will pursue any tactic that moves the odds. Profit is realized when the odds shift favorably, and since this price action can be driven by factors other than the event’s true resolution before the market closes, accuracy is secondary to influence.

And this is where the critical insight emerges: in an economy increasingly built on gamblified incentive loops, the greatest profits will flow to those who can shape beliefs across different populations. This is the context for what we call in this paper the Poly-Pump Fake and this is a technique that depends on a crucial distinction between two fundamental concepts: accuracy and confidence.

II. Accuracy Versus Confidence: Why Markets Mistake Conviction for Truth

Prediction markets measure the intensity of belief, not the correctness of belief. They aggregate collective conviction efficiently, but this is not a guarantee that the resulting confidence is justified. This is why so-called “bonds” in prediction markets (a term used by the PM community for markets trading with probabilities between 80% and 95%) are not a guarantee of resolution, as many might assume.

The structural weakness of relying on confidence is famously documented in intelligence analysis. Chapter 5 of The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis shows that as analysts receive more information, their confidence in their conclusions often rises sharply, while their actual accuracy barely moves.

One example from the chapter describes horse-race experts where they grow more certain about their picks as they gather more data, but their win rate remains flat.

For the market manipulator, this Accuracy vs. Confidence distinction provides two primary avenues of attack:

1. Manipulating Accuracy (Kinetic or Direct Non-Kinetic Intervention): This involves taking an active hand in changing how an event will resolve.

   
   As we have explored in our papers on Assassination Semantics and The Importance of Understanding Non-Kinetic Intervention, this ranges from costly “kinetic interventions” (violence, direct action) to forms of “non-kinetic intervention” where a participant with access directly influences the outcome (e.g., bribing a referee, influencing a policy decision).

   
   Another recent example comes days ago of this paper’s publishing with the capture of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces (Operation Absolute Resolve) where Polymarket’s on-chain data shows at least three “insider” wallets that made over $630,000 on Polymarket by betting on his ouster when odds were at just 6%.
   

2. Manipulating Confidence (Indirect Non-Kinetic Intervention): This involves changing people’s beliefs about reality, which is almost exclusively achieved through non-kinetic means targeting the information ecosystem. This is about manufacturing the consensus that drives the trade.
   
   Consider Bill Ackman’s infamous 2020 TV appearance: while he spent nearly half an hour stoking public panic over the impending economic devastation of COVID-19, his fund sat on a massive $27 million bet that the markets would collapse. The resulting sell-off transformed that position into a staggering $2.6 billion profit, proving that in a panic, the person who defines the nightmare owns the market.

This second category where the manipulation of confidence induces a profitable trade will be the focus of this paper and is the operational core of the ‘Poly-Pump Fake’.

III. The Poly-Pump Fake: Convergence of Classic Market Manipulation Techniques

The Poly-Pump Fake is not a revolutionary concept; rather, it is a sophisticated convergence of four tried-and-true internet-age market manipulation strategies tailored for the hyper-liquidity of prediction markets.

We have named it the Poly-Pump Fake (a term we use without prejudice toward any specific platform) because of the multi-dimensional complexity of the attack. The “Poly” acknowledges that a successful manipulation requires multiple information channels to be “pumped” simultaneously to create a false but profitable consensus.

The concept draws its structure from four distinct progenitors of online influence:

1. Political Disinformation for Profit (The Macedonian Model): In 2016, teenagers in Macedonia created sensationalist political narratives (such as the “Pope Endorses Trump” hoax) not out of ideological conviction, but purely to drive Facebook traffic and AdSense clickthrough revenue and profiting handsomely in the process. This is also the model that people who accuse certain parties of being a “grifter” are believed to be operating where the media personality doesn’t believe or care what they say as long as it is profitable with their audience. In both cases, the goal isn’t to change the world, but to profit from the friction created by a polarized public.
   

2. Stock Market Head Fakes: This involves the use of fabricated content (hacked accounts, deepfakes, or fake press releases) to create artificial market signals. The goal is to generate rapid, short-term volatility based on false information, allowing the manipulator to enter or exit a profitable position before the deception is exposed. Here are four examples:
   

   1. The 2013 AP Hack: A single hacked tweet from the Associated Press claiming an explosion at the White House had injured President Obama caused a 143-point drop in the Dow Jones in seconds.
      
      

   2. The 2022 Eli Lilly Hoax: A parody “verified” account tweeting that “insulin is free now” erased $15 billion of the company’s market cap in hours.
      
      

   3. The 2023 Pentagon Deepfake: An AI-generated image of an explosion near the Pentagon briefly tanked the S&P 500, illustrating how synthetic media can trigger algorithmic sell-offs before the truth can catch up.
      
      

3. Sports Betting Head Fakes: Professional betting syndicates have long used “head fakes“ where they plant rumors or what people believe to be inside information to move a betting line. By influencing the public’s perceived knowledge, they shift the odds to a favorable entry point before the truth is revealed. Conversations with sportsbook operators reveal a constant “cat-and-mouse” game against these sophisticated groups that trade on noise rather than news.
   

4. The Crypto “Rug Pull” and “Pump and Dump”: The world of alternative cryptocurrencies likely provides the most relevant blueprint for the Poly-Pump Fake because many people coming into the prediction market space come directly from the cryptocurrency and NFT world. Using many means to get attention and belief towards their projects, crypto influencers hype a token (see the ill-fated Squid Game (SQUID) coin or the recent Hawk Tuah ($HAWK) coin) to drive up the price through manufactured “fear of missing out” (FOMO). Once the market hits peak confidence, the insiders dump their holdings (the “rug pull”), leaving retail investors with worthless assets.

The Poly-Pump Fake is the natural evolution of these strategies.

It is a politically agnostic operation that seeks to create a false consensus by leveraging multiple sources to profit from the resulting volatility.

We have already seen the first tremors of this kind of technique: the November 2025 “Institute for the Study of War Map Manipulation“ incident, where an unauthorized edit to a frontline map briefly showed the capture of Myrnohrad, triggered a $1.3 million payout on Polymarket before the correction was issued.

Even following the recent capture of Nicolás Maduro, we have seen people trying to capitalize on the attention of these geopolitical prediction markets by trying to come off as an insider putting down a lot of money (like on China capturing Taiwan before the end of 2026) and trying to get other bettors to copy-trade in order to try to pump up the market prices.

If this seems overwhelming right now, we want to point out that we are still at the VERY beginning of the potential of the Poly-Pump Fake with the main catalyst for the bigger explosion going to be the ever improving nature of generative AI.

IV. Generative AI: The “Splitting of the Atom” for the Poly-Pump Fake

While the Pentagon deepfake and recent crypto “rug pulls” utilize AI, they remain largely “hand-spun” operations. As AI capabilities evolve, the friction of human oversight is being removed. A single actor can now deploy a synthetic crowd to manufacture market confidence at scale through the following methods:

1. Persona Multiplexing: Using Multimodal LLMs to generate thousands of unique, context-aware social media accounts, “independent” blogs, and forged documents. These synthetic voices act in concert to echo a market-moving narrative, creating a false sense of consensus that is nearly impossible to distinguish from genuine grassroots belief.
   

2. High-Fidelity Forgery: The 2013 AP hack relied on a simple text tweet; the 2023 Pentagon deepfake was a crude image. Today, generative audio and video can simulate a “leaked” briefing or a “live” incident report with enough fidelity to trigger high-frequency algorithmic trading before human fact-checkers can even begin to investigate.
   

3. Weaponizing the “Fog of War”: AI doesn’t simply spread blatant lies; it creates plausible noise in information vacuums. During active kinetic conflicts where bullets and bombs can make verified reporting difficult, the public and the 24-hour news cycle refuse to accept silence. In these moments of peak uncertainty, bettors crave any “insider” signal they can find to possibly profit off of. AI is uniquely suited to fill this vacuum with hyper-realistic, fabricated intelligence that feels authoritative, allowing a manipulator to plant a rumor that “sticks” simply because it is the only information available in the chaos.

V. Incentivized Insurgency: The Geopolitical Worst-Case Scenarios

The convergence of Generative AI and prediction markets creates a “Splitting of the Atom” moment for national security because it financializes the anticipation of tragedy. We are moving toward a reality where attackers do not just seek to destroy; they seek to harvest the volatility they create.

1. The “Trading on Terror” Precedent: History provides a grim blueprint for this. Following the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, researchers Robert J. Jackson Jr. and Joshua Mitts documented a massive, “extraordinary” surge in short-selling of Israeli ETFs and stocks just days prior. On October 2, short-selling volume in the MSCI Israel ETF (EIS) shot up to nearly 100% of off-exchange volume which exceeded the activity seen during the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a Poly-Pump Fake scenario, an attacker could use AI to amplify this profit. By “pumping” a narrative of regional peace or stability across social media, they can artificially depress the price of “Attack Occurs” shares. They buy the “Yes” shares at a discount while the world is distracted by a synthetic calm or sustained uncertainty of what’s going on, then execute the kinetic strike. The market doesn’t just predict the event, it funds the perpetrator.

2. The Reverse Pump: The “Cry Wolf” Exploit: Conversely, the Poly-Pump Fake can be used to manufacture “Pearl Harbor” moments that never happen. By using high-fidelity deepfakes and persona multiplexing to simulate a credible, imminent threat to US soil, an actor can spike the price of “Attack on US” markets. They exit their positions at peak panic, realizing massive gains from a crisis that was entirely hallucinatory. This creates a “Cry Wolf” effect that degrades the signal-to-noise ratio for actual intelligence agencies relying on OSINT, making the public and the markets numb to real warnings (see the phenomenon of “alarm fatigue”).

3. The Rise of Offshore “Attack Markets” on the U.S.: Recent cases of “insider betting” on military strikes have largely involved US or allied actions against foreign targets. However, we must prepare for a future where these markets focus on kinetic strikes against the United States. While US-regulated platforms like Kalshi enforce strict KYC (Know Your Customer) mandates under CFTC oversight, the global landscape is shifting toward total obfuscation. Even on platforms like Polymarket (where international users trade without KYC), the public nature of the blockchain allows for chain analysis that can eventually link a wallet to an identity. To circumvent this, the next generation of “Attack Markets” is migrating toward deeper layers of the stack:

• Total Anonymity via Privacy Coins: Expect to see a shift toward decentralized platforms that utilize privacy-focused assets like Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC). These tokens use ring signatures and zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to hide transaction amounts and participant identities, making traditional financial forensics impossible.

• The Deep-Web Convergence: Betting platforms are increasingly running adjacent to dark-web marketplaces. By hosting these markets on Onion-routed servers (Tor) and utilizing decentralized oracles, adversaries can create a liquid, anonymous betting markets that essentially run like a bounty system for US national security failures.
  
  

• Insider Intelligence as a Weapon: We have been fortunate that our adversaries have not yet fully weaponized “Betting Intelligence” (BETINT) on these insider bets around US-led military attacks. But when nation-states begin monitoring these signals to front-run US military responses, it puts the lives of our soldiers in immediate, quantifiable danger.

While a profitable “9/11” or “Pearl Harbor” market opportunity has not yet reached full scale, the infrastructure is already operational (as explored in our previous Semantic Assassination paper). As our economy and reality become further “gamblified,” these US attack markets will become increasingly more local and specific.

VI. Establishing Frameworks for Assessing the Threat

To counter the Poly-Pump Fake and its associated non-kinetic interventions, national security agencies require a formalized architecture, ideally a BETINT (Betting Intelligence) Framework similar to the MITRE ATT&CK matrix for cyber threats. While this field of study is still nascent and we encourage grant agencies to fund more study around betting market mechanisms, BetBreakingNews is actively working on codifying the methodology used by adversarial actors to exploit the “Confidence-Accuracy Gap.”

Specifically with the Poly-Pump Fake in mind, an ideal model for assessing the risk of an attempt would likely combine two core analytical structures: a Trust/Influence Chain and a Market Vulnerability Score.

Potential Framework Components:

• The ATHENA Kill Chain (Trust and Influence): BetBreakingNews CEO Sean Guillory published this model that focuses on how adversarial actors establish influence over a target using AI. The phases (Access → Trust → Hook → Enrage/Entice → Normalize → Action) map directly onto the psychological steps required to get a betting community to accept a false narrative and act on it. When it comes to betting markets: the ATHENA Kill Chain maps the psychological and operational steps required to hijack a betting community’s conviction:

• Access & Trust: The manipulator doesn’t just “post”; they embed. Using Persona Multiplexing, they bypass “bullshit detectors” by building long-term credibility or compromising existing trusted nodes.

• The Hook & Enticement: During a “Fog of War“ event, the actor introduces a high-fidelity signal (e.g., a deepfake “leak”). This appeals to the trader’s desire to be “first” and “right”.

• Normalize & Action: Once the market moves, the price action itself becomes a “proof of truth,” creating a feedback loop that entices the broader public to “buy the pump” while the manipulator prepares their exit.

• Market Vulnerability Factors: Andrew Courtney’s work on assessing the riskiness of a market identifies factors that expose a market to manipulation, including: Wide public interest (25%), Social usefulness of probability (20%), Breadth of information surface (10%), Resistance to manipulation (10%), Clear resolution criteria (10%), Hedge utility (10%), Market uniqueness (5%), Right level of difficulty / randomness (5%), and Useful path volatility (5%). An effective framework must leverage factors like these to identify high-value, high-risk targets.

Core Elements of Poly-Pump Fake Analysis:

Beyond the above mentioned frameworks, an effective operational model for conducting, assessing, or mitigating a Poly-Pump Fake must include the following critical components:

1. Goal and Audience Profiling: The attacker must understand more than just “making money.” They must profile the target betting community like what are the sources they trust, what are the topics they find plausible, and which groups (demographics, political leaning) do they deem as easy to trick, often out of spite or prejudice?

2. Information Exchange Access: Success is dependent on finding access to the community’s information exchange spaces (e.g. online forums, messenger groups, publications, or even real-life clubs). The attacker must gain access to where people trust receiving and sharing information, even if they harbor skepticism about certain parts of it.

3. Trust-Building and Staking: This is the phase that takes the longest. The attacker must conduct sufficient legwork to either become a trusted source within the community or gain the trust of the main influencers. Success is achieved when one knows exactly what messages will be believed, which channels and sources to push the information through, and when the market will react.

4. Exit Strategy: Any model must consider a clean egress from both the market and potentially the community. If the established alias staked its reputation on the false information, an immediate exit from the market and the digital community is a mandatory contingency.

VII. Conclusion: How BETINT Can Help

In a world where everything is a bet, everyone is a participant, and all information has price impact, the most profitable strategy is no longer predicting the truth; it’s shaping the consensus long enough to profit from the wave you created in the “fog”.

As we have seen, the “Truth Machine” pitch of these prediction market platforms fails the moment an adversary realizes they don’t have to be right; they only have to move people. Truth pays eventually, but confidence pays immediately.

The infrastructure for an “Incentivized Insurgency” is already operational. From the Macedonian Model to potential Offshore Attack Markets running on Monero and Onion-routed servers, the threat to US national security is no longer theoretical. If we do not develop robust BETINT capabilities to track the coordinated movement of price, sentiment, and synthetic persona credibility, we leave our economic and kinetic security at the mercy of those who can pull off a successful Poly-Pump Fake.

BetBreakingNews is actively developing countermeasures and specialized workshop materials for government organizations, NGOs, and platforms. Understanding that we are living in a monetized reality is the first step; securing that reality is the next.

Betting Intelligence (BETINT): The use of betting market behavior as an intelligence signal of intent, insider knowledge, and pending real-world action.

This new form of intelligence collection joins a family of' ‘INTs’, such as SIGINT, OSINT, HUMINT, VISINT, and more.

As the world rapidly evolves into a global casino, the need for warning intelligence only rises.

Join us here in our mission to collect, uncover, analyze, and distribute BETINT across the modern world.

Why Betting Data Matters

Betting intelligence is more than odds, volume, or profit and loss sheets. It is the heartbeat of a platform: who bets, when, at what stake, on which outcomes. That data can be very dangerous in the wrong hands.

Consider the type of folks who might want that data. Competitors and insiders are eager to detect emerging trends before the public or before markets adjust, using that early signal to front-run or recalibrate their own models. State actors might seek to map the networks behind a market: identifying sharp bettors, reverse-engineering predictive models, or pinpointing structural vulnerabilities. And then there are malicious actors, who could breach, extort, or manipulate the system by leaking identities, placing insider trades, or injecting disinformation to distort outcomes. All of them recognize the same thing: betting data isn’t just a reflection of opinion, it’s actionable intelligence, and that makes it a target.

And don’t think that a blockchain or TLS encryption is the silver bullet of protection when the modus operandi for threat actors is shifting to “Harvest now, decrypt later”. Adversaries intercept and store encrypted traffic today, waiting for quantum computers to break it in the future. Chinese and U.S. labs have already made strides in quantum decryption: see reports on China breaking RSA-like codes and the push to quantum-resistant systems. This is not speculative, cryptographic primitives once considered safe are being challenged, and legacy systems are vulnerable to retrospective decryption.

And note that casinos and betting institutions are currently on the radars of threat actors looking for a payday. Hacks at major casinos such as Caesars Palace or MGM show that systems thought protected can still be breached. If trading records, bettor identities, or internal algorithms leak, w, regulatory exposure, and possibly personal risk to insiders.

When betting platforms ignore the value of their data, they are handing over their strategic backbone. As the world begins to treat BETINT as an intelligence asset, attackers will elevate their methods. Platforms must anticipate, not react.

GABRL as a Defense Layer for BETINT Systems

When I first encountered GABRL, it struck me as unusually well aligned to the risks that prediction markets face. Born from national security thinking, GABRL offers a network-layer security solution that many platforms currently lack.

GABRL encrypts traffic at Layer 3 (the network layer), so every packet between endpoints, apps, APIs, and devices is protected — not just the ones that speak TLS or sit behind VPNs. In contrast to many tools that focus at the application layer, GABRL minimizes the “attack surface” by securing everything at a deeper level.

It is Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) compliant, meaning it uses algorithms designed to resist quantum decryption. That is exactly the kind of foresight a betting platform needs: if adversaries are storing traffic today, GABRL helps ensure they can’t break it later.

It works across infrastructure types — bare metal, cloud, hybrid, fragmented architectures — and can coexist with existing VPNs or replace them seamlessly. Because of its network-level design, latency overhead is minimal and scaling is efficient. An additional camouflage dimension: traffic obfuscation / spoofing. To outside observers, protected traffic can mimic innocuous flows (Zoom, video, generic streams) to reduce detection risk.

Currently, GABRL is licensed for use by U.S. entities under ITAR restrictions. Non-U.S. platforms may need alternative but analogous solutions — feel free to reach out to us for guidance. When I saw GABRL in action, the first vertical I thought of was betting and casino platforms — not just for protecting financial and transactional data, but because the intelligence layer (betting metadata, VIP flows, sharp bettor patterns) is exactly what adversaries target. In short: GABRL was built for high-stakes, high-risk environments, and betting fits that mold perfectly.

Why Platforms Must Act Now

The world of prediction markets is no longer nascent. With platforms like Polymarket recently valued in the billions, the competitive stakes are rising. As the conversation around BETINT matures, so too will the threats. At BetBreakingNews, we argue that every serious platform should not only build new markets, but also build defenses. That’s why we emphasize roles like a Global Risk Officer (as we discussed in Assassination Semantics) — someone whose job is to worry about data threats before they become crises.

We don’t want to be the functionaries of fear — we want the field to succeed. The global event betting ecosystem has potential for huge insight, innovation, and social impact. But it will collapse if data is harvested, trades are manipulated, or insiders are exposed. That’s why we introduce tools like GABRL: not to stifle growth, but to protect it.

If you run a prediction market, sportsbook, casino, or any platform handling predictive data flows, here are key priorities:

• Make data security a board-level imperative. Having encryption is not enough; you need leadership with cryptographic literacy and threat awareness.
  
  

• Audit your architecture deeply. Which endpoints are exposed? What traffic is recorded? What happens if someone decrypts your past logs?
  
  

• Deploy quantum-resistant solutions now (like GABRL) rather than later. In the U.S., GABRL is production-ready; globally, look for equivalent alternatives or partnerships.
  
  

• Prepare to partner with security and national-security experts. Betting groups rarely have full in-house cryptographic or threat modeling depth — collaboration is essential.
  
  

If you’re building a market, a data product, or an intelligence pipeline around prediction, you can’t afford to ignore the data threats — especially those evolving from quantum advances. GABRL is not the only answer. It won’t stop every hack or manipulation. But it is precisely the kind of technology serious platforms should adopt before the next wave of threats hits.

If you want to talk through how GABRL or related defenses could integrate into your architecture or strategy, drop me a message at betbreakingnews@protonmail.com . This isn’t hype. It’s about protecting value — yours, your users’, and the future of predictive markets.

We wonder what percentage of Americans would say they’ve never gambled. Any number larger than the percentage of Amish and electricity-free hermits left in this country would suggest a lack of awareness about what “gambling” actually is.

Gambling isn’t just poker tables, DraftKings, or lottery tickets. Spin a wheel on Temu or Shein, open a loot box in your favorite mobile game, tear open a pack of Pokémon cards or Labubu blind boxes, collect McDonald’s Happy Meal toys that have slot machines in them, or roll for your favorite waifu in a gacha game, that’s gambling. You may not have signed up for it, but you’ve been in a casino this whole time.

What once looked like gimmicks or game mechanics has been quietly becoming the norm for everyday transactions. Transactional certainty is giving way to probabilistic play. Everything (from digital shopping carts to content feeds) is beginning to contain a roll, spin, or “surprise me” button.

Prediction markets (i.e. platforms that allow people to bet on anything from sports to elections to social trends) are ascending. Polymarket and Kalshi are already valued in the tens of billions, and that number will climb. With Trump Media & Technology Group publicly announcing plans to enter prediction markets, these mechanisms are not going away under the current administration that will benefit from them. Meanwhile, investors like Andreessen Horowitz are eager to expand them even further in a bid to help companies that are struggling to grow revenue in a slowing economy where consumers are spending less.

With all of these factors in mind, it’s our belief here at BetBreakingNews that the U.S. is heading toward an economy where gambling is not an activity, it will be the architecture. We believe that the day is coming when every purchase will include a gambling mechanism where instead of simply paying for something transactionally, you’ll be nudged or forced to play for the chance to win it.

This paper is about the future we see where transactional purchases become endangered, and most economic activity revolves around betting, chance, and the constant monetization of uncertainty. To help conceptualize where this belief is coming from, let us give you four keywords that will define this coming order from an economic, social, and psychological lens: Hypergamblification, Luck-Based Economy, Monetized Reality, and Market Awareness.

II. Terms That Will Define the Near-Future Experience

Something that seems so obvious it hardly feels worth mentioning is the idea that you purchase items and services with money. Straightforward enough, right? But that basic premise becomes unstable in the face of economic stagnation, tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in the rise of AI/Automation/”technological update”, and a wave of program defunding and spending freezes under the current administration has further reduced disposable income and social support.

So what can companies do when consumers have less to spend but the corporate appetite for profit only grows when raising prices or shrinkflating products invites backlash? From the trends we brought up earlier in this paper, we think companies will start to discover the subtler but more addictive option of turning ordinary purchases into games of chance.

The cultural climate has already normalized gambling thanks to the explosion of sports betting, prediction markets, and all the “non-gambling gambling” mechanics we outlined in Section I. Increasingly, we’ll be offered the chance to pay a smaller price for the chance to get something cheaper. Imagine: you can buy a carton of eggs for $4, or pay 50 cents per spin to “win” the carton. Many people will take the cheaper gamble, believing luck might tilt their way, while companies will profit from the probabilities stacked quietly in their favor.

This migration from transactional purchase to probabilistic play is what we call hypergamblification, the process by which everything that used to be a transaction becomes a gamble. And when this model becomes ubiquitous (i.e. when there are more gambling options than straightforward transactions for any purchase be it from gas to rent to healthcare to tuition), we will have entered what we call a luck-based economy.

In a luck-based economy, economic activity is dominated not by stable exchanges but by probabilistic outcomes, with risk structures that benefit the companies in the same way casino games benefit the house. It may sound unbelievable, but the infrastructure is already under construction. Observe the trajectory of how prediction markets would want to expand: broader scope of topic, yet finer granularity within topics, and increasing “permissionlessness” where anyone can create or participate in a market about anything.

That scaling mirrors the rise of the internet. Just as every element of “real life” eventually found its way online, we’re heading toward a world where everything will have a simulacra’d market attached to it. This is monetized reality, a condition in which every fact, perception, or event can be priced, traded, or hedged through a bet. Every maybe, every what if, becomes a marketplace of belief. The cognitive domain (the realm of ideas, expectations, and narratives that is discussed within national security concept development circles) turns into an arena where these sometimes hard to measure things all now have a monetary value attached.

And as the market layer overlays everything as reality gets monetized, two new cognitive conditions emerge: market awareness and market self-awareness. Market awareness is the recognition that all these different things are being tracked, priced, or speculated upon and market self-awareness is the behavioral adaptation that follows once you realize there are markets that involve you as a “player” (likely made without your consent) and you are aware of how your actions, performance, or statements can influence those markets. Trying to opt out of these markets would be like trying to opt out of capitalism itself: you can reject it in principle, but it still dictates the terms of your survival.

A recent example of market self-awareness would be Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, publicly admitted to trolling prediction markets by deliberately saying specific words on his company’s earnings call that traders had set up markets around. Some called it manipulation. But in reality, Armstrong was simply acknowledging that these markets existed and that he had agency within them. He didn’t ask to be bet on, but he wasn’t about to pretend ignorance of the market where the results are controlled by his actions.

This is what market self-awareness looks like in practice and it won’t stay confined to CEOs. Politicians, journalists, athletes, even students or local officials, all will eventually navigate markets that exist about them. These feedback loops transform markets from tools of observation into mirrors of performance; once you know that you’re being wagered upon, you begin to act with that knowledge.

Together, these forces (hypergamblification, luck-based economy, monetized reality, market awareness, and market self-awareness) define the behavioral and economic substrate of the near future. They describe a world where participation in gambling is no longer optional; it’s embedded in every interface, transaction, and performance metric. Life becomes a casino you can’t leave not because of moral failure or addiction, but because the casino has become the economy itself. The luck-based economy and monetized reality will surround everything and opting out only costs you more. Assessing if this future is good or bad is almost beside the point. What matters is that it’s already happening. With Trump Media’s plans to move into prediction markets and a broader tech-investor push to expand them, hypergamblification will be the next major innovation meta once the current AI bubble pops.

III. Betting Intelligence (BETINT) as a Necessity for Understanding the Monetized Reality

The last section may seem dark and hopeless, but there is a light: the ability to understand the markets that shape you or that you can shape. That light is what we’ve called betting intelligence (BETINT) in our previous writings (see 1, 2, 3). Intelligence in this context refers to the same sense used in OSINT, SIGINT, or HUMINT; different disciplines of collecting and interpreting signals. BETINT is the discipline of analyzing prediction markets, sportsbook odds, and event-betting flows to infer real-time belief, deception, coordination, and risk behavior. Its purpose is to turn these probabilistic traces into timely insight and action.

BETINT isn’t a gold-standard INT that replaces the others; it completes them. The modern information environment no longer ends at discourse or data, it extends into probabilistic expression. When people stake money on an outcome, they’re revealing a fusion of belief, incentive, confidence, and perceived truth.

When someone bets on whether a country will attack another, whether a sex toy will be thrown onto a basketball court, or who will win the Nobel Peace Prize, the motivations can vary but the most reliable bets often come from those who have an active hand in shaping the result. That’s why knowing where these markets exist, what they cover, how much money is flowing through them, and what influence you or others might exert over their outcomes becomes essential.

BETINT equips countries, institutions, companies, and individuals alike to navigate this landscape. Market awareness requires market literacy and BETINT is the analytic layer that helps decision-makers separate signals from spectacle, crowd bias from informed belief, and genuine probability from manipulation.

Our goal is to show what the near-future environment will look like and how BETINT can help everyone in this new economic reality not only understand it, but also navigate and even capitalize on it. The true value of BETINT isn’t just in predicting the future; it’s in mapping how belief about the future is being traded, coordinated, and weaponized in real time. “Know thyself” hits differently when the act of reading markets becomes the act of reading ourselves.

IV. When Everything is a Casino, Are you Still not Allowed to Cry In It?

This paper addresses what we believe is the most important and under-acknowledged issue facing national security and societal stability. It’s the reason we stepped away from our respective fields to build BetBreakingNews.

We’ve long understood the potential (and the danger) of prediction markets at scale. As far back as 2002, DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market project showed the strategic possibilities of having prediction markets at scale. Even with our team’s years of experience in the betting space, even a year ago we wouldn’t have predicted how fast hypergamblification would become inevitable. It began with Kalshi introducing sports-related markets on its platform through a clever loophole that allowed sports betting in states where it wasn’t yet legalized. Then the real turning point came when the Trump administration embraced prediction markets (including political ones) and investors rushing in to push gambling and betting mechanisms into more corners of the economy than ever before.

Every possible event, product, or outcome will be transformed into a betting opportunity. That is the trajectory for at least the remainder of Trump’s administration, and given how weak the opposition to the president’s mandates has been so far, this isn’t a future that can simply be regulated or legislated away. Once these systems take hold with the public, any attempt to uproot them later will face a population too accustomed (and too financially invested) to let them go without serious resistance.

This paper tried to discuss this with moral neutrality; as the saying goes, “there’s no crying in the casino”. We’re simply playing the hand we’ve been dealt and showing anyone willing to listen how to become a sharp, advantage-seeking player in this next economic phase through the use of BETINT. When everything can be bet on, the only way to stay ahead is to understand where the odds are set, who is setting them, and what those odds reveal. The casino of existence is already here. And it’s going to be everywhere soon enough. Try not to cry.

Sean asked me to write this piece because the U.S. prediction market is at a critical juncture. It could evolve into something vibrant and efficient, like the best models I’ve seen in Asia and Australia. Or it could spiral into dysfunction, repeating the mistakes that crippled the U.K.

The direction this industry takes will depend on two things: how operators treat sharp bettors and how regulators enforce their rules. If we get either of those wrong, the “bad ending” comes fast. But if we learn from history, the U.S. has a real chance to build the most innovative and trusted prediction market ecosystem in the world.

The Betfair Lesson: When Exchanges Flourished — and When They Fell

Let’s start with a little history. Prediction market people often talk like this is brand new, but the core mechanics have been tested before. The closest historical cousin is Betfair, the betting exchange that reshaped wagering in the U.K. in the early 2000s.

At its peak, Betfair was a revelation. For the first time, bettors could trade against each other instead of just betting into the house’s line. Prices were sharper, liquidity was deeper, and — this is key — sharp bettors were not just tolerated but integral to the system.

You had arbitrage traders backing outcomes with traditional sportsbooks and laying them on Betfair. Recreational punters benefited because the odds reflected real information, not just the house’s margin. And even sportsbooks gained, because they had a liquid venue where they could hedge risk. It was a proper ecosystem, with each type of participant adding something valuable.

But then came the “fixes.” Regulators and operators began treating sharp bettors like parasites rather than providers of liquidity. Betfair imposed “premium charges” on consistent winners — up to 60% of profits.

What followed was predictable: liquidity dried up, pricing became less efficient, and sharp bettors either left or were forced into elaborate reindeer games — running fleets of accounts under different names, playing signup bonuses, disguising their action. The trust was gone, the ecosystem collapsed.

This is the U.K. today: a betting market that once looked like the future, now reduced to a cautionary tale. Most U.K. books now act less like traders and more like marketing fronts for odds suppliers such as Kambi, Genius, or Radar. They don’t actually price markets—they just retail someone else’s lines and restrict anyone who consistently beats them. That hollows out the ecosystem: operators lose the ability (and incentive) to understand real prices, and liquidity becomes fragile. Worse, this setup is easy to game. A sharp can nudge a supplier’s line through one outlet, then exploit the shifted odds on another operator using the same feed. The result is a market that still looks alive but is really just a network of storefronts selling cloned prices—thin, manipulable, and allergic to sharp information. And if you squint, you can already see shadows of that same story forming in the U.S. prediction market space.

The Good Place: Asia’s Handicaps and Australia’s Minimum Bet Laws

The good news is that there are positive models too. The best markets I’ve seen are in Asia, particularly the handicap markets, and the best regulatory framework I’ve seen is in Australia.

In Asia, big players like Tony Bloom can put down massive wagers that move the line instantly. That’s not manipulation — it’s information. The market absorbs the bet, adjusts, and becomes more efficient. Smaller bettors can then find value on the other side. Liquidity is high, pricing is sharp, and nobody is banned for being good at the game.

Australia, meanwhile, has taken a different but equally smart approach around horse racing bets. Regulators there implemented minimum-bet laws requiring operators to take a reasonable wager from any customer — often enough to allow $2,000 in winnings. The result is that sharp players can always get on, and recreational players benefit from efficient lines.

Both systems recognize a simple truth: sharp money makes markets healthier. If you exclude or punish sharps, you don’t protect casual players — you hurt them by giving them weaker odds and thinner liquidity.

Why Things Go Right or Wrong

Having seen this play out across countries, the success or failure of a betting ecosystem almost always comes down to two levers.

First, how operators treat sharp bettors. It’s not enough to cater to whales who lose more than they win — those players get the red-carpet treatment everywhere. The real test is whether operators tolerate consistent winners who use superior models, better information, or sharper judgment. If they’re embraced, markets thrive. If they’re excluded, markets degrade.

Second, how regulators prioritize enforcement. Too often, governments hammer legal operators because they’re easy targets, while letting offshore platforms flourish unchecked. The irony is rich: regulators pile costs onto the companies they can reach, making them uncompetitive, while offshore books scoop up the best customers.

In the U.K., that overreach didn’t stop with the operators — it extended to the bettors themselves. “Responsible gaming” rules now require some players to hand over unredacted bank statements or get capped on how much they can wager based on where they live or what they earn. It’s a chilling vision of paternalism that drives serious bettors underground and punishes informed risk-taking.

When operators and regulators both get this wrong, you end up with the “bad U.K. future.”

The Bad Ending: The U.K. Model

The bad ending goes like this:

1. No visible sharp action. Efficient pricing disappears because consistent winners are barred.
   

2. Reindeer games. Sharps run multi-account operations, use friends and family as fronts, and treat legal books as disposable “outs” rather than partners.
   

3. Struggling operators. Without sharp-informed pricing, books lose more money to the few sharps that slip through, all while liquidity dries up.
   

4. Regulatory squeeze. Governments, instead of pulling back, tighten the screws on legal operators until they’re begging for subsidies. That’s right: the supposed tax-raising industry ends up needing bailouts, which has actually happened in the U.K.
   

5. Offshore dominance. The only real innovation and profitability comes from unlicensed offshore operators. And bettors — both sharp and recreational — figure that out quickly. With a VPN and some crypto, they’re gone.
   

Here’s another irony: crypto itself, with its transparent ledgers, could have made onshore betting more trustworthy. Instead, it becomes the backbone of offshore markets, while legal operators are stuck defending inefficient systems.

The U.S. Crossroads

If you’re following this story, you probably recognize pieces of that bad ending already looming in the U.S.

Look at the incumbents. FanDuel is already dipping into prediction markets, and DraftKings may follow. Both have long histories of squeezing or shutting down sharp bettors in their sportsbooks. Do we really think they’ll treat prediction markets differently?

Look at Kalshi. They’ve published a long list of categories of people barred from trading under CFTC restrictions — an entire class of sharp participants excluded. Polymarket, now operating in the U.S. under CFTC approval, will likely have to abide by the same. That means entire sources of high-quality information are locked out, making pricing worse, not better.

And don’t forget the regulators. State and tribal gaming commissions are already furious that the CFTC approved Kalshi’s sports markets. They’re moving to treat Kalshi and Polymarket like illegal offshore books because they bypassed the usual licensing path. This is the exact pattern we’ve seen before: legal operators take the regulatory hit while offshores sit back and thrive.

Meanwhile, the ecosystem is crowded. There are nearly 200 prediction markets listed on predictionindex.xyz, and that doesn’t even count novelty props at casinos or the many new entrants eyeing the space. Some will be offshore, some will operate in gray zones, and some will be startups looking for their wedge. If legal incumbents think bettors “have no choice,” they’re in for a rude awakening. Sharps want as many outs as possible. Recreational players can be fickle too — it doesn’t take much to push them toward competitors.

Still Time for the Good Ending

Despite all this, I don’t think the U.S. market is doomed. History is close to repeating itself, but there’s still a chance to steer toward the better models.

That means regulators need to stop punishing visible sharp action and start encouraging it. It means operators need to think in terms of long-term ecosystem health, not short-term exclusion of winners. It means learning from Asia’s handicap markets and Australia’s minimum-bet rules — not sleepwalking into the U.K.’s collapse.

If we get it right, prediction markets could become the most efficient, transparent, and trusted betting markets in the world. If we get it wrong, they’ll become little more than feeders for offshore books.

What are the odds that the U.S. actually learns from history? Heh. Maybe someone should open a prediction market on that.

If you’re interested in digging deeper into the history behind all this or exploring ways to help prevent the U.K.’s “bad future” from replaying in your jurisdiction, reach out to Gary Morland and the BetBreakingNews team at betbreakingnews@protonmail.com . We’re always up for a smart conversation about how to make betting markets sharper, fairer, and more resilient.

When we published our earlier writing on non-kinetic interventions, we warned that markets do more than reflect belief. They offer incentives, create pressure, and sometimes encourage actions beyond just placing bets. We said we would follow that up with a paper on kinetic interventions where death, incapacitation, or physical harm become not just possibilities, but embedded options in market logic. What happens when a market that seems innocent or generic becomes an implicit assassination market? Recent events make the question urgent.

We’ll admit: this is a spicy topic. Some folks in prediction market circles may think we are trying to “poop the party.” But ignoring this issue especially after what happened to Charlie Kirk (who was assassinated on September 10, 2025, while speaking at Utah Valley University) is dangerous. There had been markets on his running for political office (“Charlie Kirk running for office by 2029”) on platforms like Kalshi. No one thought at first that those prediction markets could resolve by assassination but folks need to learn that that possibility always looms.

If the “playing field” of prediction markets includes people’s life, health or survival matter, then everyone becomes a potential variable to be calculated in the forecast. Markets that resolve on whether someone stays in power, speaks publicly, shows up somewhere, or holds a certain job carry implicit incentives connected to their continued existence. Nearly every such market dealing with control, decision, or public appearance is technically an assassination market and that slip between semantic phrasing and real violence is the core risk we are discussing in this writing.

Assassinations by Another Name

There have been recent longer form X writings around concepts like Semantic Fragmentation (where slight wording differences in a market could be unnecessarily splitting up liquidity) and Semantic Fragility (looking at the hidden weaknesses in the wording of a market) that are getting people within the prediction market space to scrutinize possible vulnerabilities/loopholes not explicitly stated in event markets. Many now see how wording choices around resolution can make or break liquidity but we want to point attention to how wording choices also explain how the option of resolving with violence is often embedded in many event markets.

Consider Polymarket’s “Trump out as president in 2025” or Kalshi’s version of that market. On its face, it’s a political wager. But if “out” includes death, then death becomes a valid path to profit. Or take “JD Vance becomes president before 2029” or markets like “Will Trump complete his term in office?”. All of them open up, however subtly, incentives tied to incapacity or demise.

Then came Charlie Kirk. Before his assassination, Kalshi had markets up on his running for public office by 2029. After his death, these markets were closed and trades placed after news broke were voided. What was assumed safe (i.e., resolution by election or term expiry) is exposed to the semantic risk of kinetic intervention where betting platforms may not realize that they are marketing such an incentive.

Almost any market can become an assassination market if there’s enough liquidity behind it. Mitigating this concern is not as simple as slapping on a blanket rule that says “if the subject of a contract dies or is gravely injured, all bets are void.” In fact, that fix can backfire: if platforms guarantee refunds after a death, bettors who are about to lose may see an incentive in making sure the contract gets voided by force.

To be clear, world event markets didn’t invent assassins. Political violence and lone-wolf actors have been around long before prediction markets and without financial incentives, the people most often motivated to assassinate are extremists or ideologues. But bring in money, and operations become efficient, professionals may get involved, the emotional distance can widen, and planning becomes feasible (“Professionals have standards”). This is what makes the shift from theory (like Jim Bell’s “Assassination Politics”) to risk: the landscape of who can act becomes broader, and consequences grow heavier.

As prediction markets (both onchain and offchain) continue to emerge, the risk that tragedy could be profited upon by a bettor continues to grow. While there have been no claims of assassinations being incentivized via any prediction platform to date, the reality exists that these dangers could emerge with little to no foresight of the market provider.

Anomalous bet tracking is an emerging research vertical and alpha identifier in prediction market trading. While users may find great value in the value of tracking anomalous traders now, there may be more than just traders interested in these signals amongst the noise (what we’ve been calling betting intelligence or BETINT).

Prediction platforms that seek regulation will inevitably be tasked with compliance demands like user tracking, geolocation, and prohibiting specific organization employees from participating. Unregulated onchain platforms will not be compelled to take such precautions.

While liquidity will always be a constant consideration for platforms as big as Polymarket and as small as emerging permissionless markets, the opportunity to profit from tragedy will present itself to the most nefarious of bettors.

What once required financiers (be it the mob, gangs, or Deutsche Bank) could now be self-funded. Prediction markets and smart contracts create the possibility that those who carry out political violence could also directly profit from it, anonymously and without intermediaries. That marks a profound shift in incentive structures.

Screenshot showing that this isn’t just us seeing the motivations of these markets.

National Security, Platforms, and Responsibility

In our non-kinetic interventions paper, we urged betting platforms, prediction markets, and commentators to build awareness of how markets reflect power and influence. Now, because kinetic risks are more severe, institutions must do more than awareness: they must have capacity for risk analysis.

Event betting platforms need geopolitical risk officers: people with backgrounds in intelligence, structured analytic techniques, and/or counter-intelligence who are capable of evaluating resolution wording, market liquidity, participant behavior, and threat models around high-stakes markets. Regulated books that host markets on public individuals are particularly vulnerable.

Also governments and intelligence communities must integrate BETINT into early warning systems. Signals can be movement of odds, new wallets placing high bets just before an attack or killing, or semantic ambiguity in markets tied to a high-profile figure. Geopolitical risk officers tracking this kind of signal before tragedy can be meaningful.

[Not so shameless plug: BetBreakingNews is ready to partner with platforms that want to build internal guardrails, early warning capacities, and better transparency around what their markets are incentivizing (intentionally or not).]

Conclusion: Facing the Reality & Moving Forward

We don’t mean for this to be a depressing paper but we felt it imperative to point out how we think world event markets have the opportunity to actually be a security add (not risk) and potentially save many lives. If we may be so bold: We are of the belief that more people knowing about prediction markets AND people knowing about the assassination potential of prediction markets could have saved Charlie’s life. More people being aware of the markets and their kinetic intervention risks would likely keep both audiences and security teams more vigilant of threats. The markets wouldn’t be a perfect signal but it’s better than not having these markets at all (not measuring the signal doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist).

Prediction market institutions have a chance now to become not just purveyors of betting, but sources of early warning intelligence. Getting rid of all risky markets isn’t feasible without shutting down large swaths of markets or pushing them offshore and that would further reduce visibility. But platforms can choose responsibility: explicitly define resolution clauses, engage risk teams, hire personnel with intel/security backgrounds, monitor high-stakes markets, build verification practices.

We hope to see the day where event markets are seen as a primary means of catching killers before they act and that the general public feels safer that they are present. Maybe someday.

In politics, security, finance, and the rest of real-world events, everyone and everything is on the field and able to play the game. That reality turns prediction and world event markets into far more than passive mirrors of public belief. When money is at stake, these markets become targets, instruments, and sometimes even engines of real-world action.

I term that phenomenon a non-kinetic intervention: actions that don’t involve “bangs and booms” (kinetics) but can nevertheless change outcomes, influence behavior, or create signals that matter operationally (please note that I’ll tackle kinetic interventions like assassinations and military strikes in another writing).

Non-kinetic interventions come in many forms. Some are informational: narrative pushes, targeted disinformation, or the deliberate release of (real or fabricated) “intel” that shifts perception and behavior.

Think of the Hindenburg Research model: publishing a scathing report that tanks a company’s stock price, which could just as easily move an event market tied to corporate performance. Some are economic: coordinated buys or sells designed to move odds, sometimes as deliberate “head fakes” like syndicates do in sports betting to mislead others before hitting their real target. Then there are hybrids that push participants into physical action. Bounty platforms or “dare” marketplaces (like the aptly named Dare Market) offer payouts for specific acts that, once carried out, resolve a market in a chosen way. Non-kinetic interventions may stop short of kinetic violence, but their consequences can be just as bloody. And they can escalate: disinformation doesn’t just distort markets, it can spill into the streets, as seen in India’s WhatsApp lynchings where false kidnapping rumors incited mobs and cost lives.

Take one public, bizarre, and instructive example: the recent dildo tosses onto the courts of WNBA games. On the surface these were ridiculous pranks. But when paired with bets on which games and what color would be thrown, deliverable interventions became a mechanism for predictable profit. The same incentive structure that drove a prank on a basketball court can be redirected toward far more dangerous ends. Like I mentioned in our first mission statement: green dildo jokes today could be green grenades tomorrow.

Another consequential example is insider front-running of geopolitical events. The September 2025 Israeli strikes on Qatar and Yemen, prediction markets saw abrupt surges in odds that looked a lot like informed bets (breakdown courtesy of top Polymarket bettor @Domahhhh). Fresh, previously inactive wallets placed large positions in the hours leading up to strikes, and those buys proved to be early signals of what was about to happen.

For national-security professionals this should ring alarm bells: markets can surface indicators of imminent action faster than traditional channels or even financial futures markets. Note they can also leak sensitive intentions or telegraph plans adversaries might exploit. The Israel–Qatar and Israel–Yemen markets showed both the power, potential, and peril within these event markets: they can serve as early-warning systems, but they can also compromise operations.

So why should any of this market meddling be acceptable or even sometimes encouraged? Because if you strip away intervention, you strip away the signal.

Sports odds are sharp precisely because certain sharp sportsbooks take action from insiders and sharps early and this sharpens the odds/line before the public “square” money pours in (and many non-sharp books simply copy those numbers). If you bar anyone with insider knowledge or influence from participating in an event market, liquidity will shrink, prices will stagnate, and the odds will be driven mostly by uninformed money.

Some may prefer that, but at BetBreakingNews we care about markets as sources of timely, actionable intelligence. All this stripping of scenarios through regulation doesn’t create safety; you just drive activity offshore into darker, less transparent venues. The challenge isn’t to make intervention impossible, but to understand, measure, and manage it.

That reframing is what I call betting intelligence or BETINT. BETINT treats world event markets not just as gambling platforms but as intelligence sources. Odds movement can reflect three things (usually in combination): the collective beliefs of the bettors, algorithmic/model updates (see the Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule (LMSR) for an example), and deliberate intervention by informed actors. Sorting among those is what turns a price change into usable intelligence.

So what should betting, national security, and policy making institutions do?

First, market operators need pragmatic policies. Drawing bright lines like “no insiders, no interventions” sounds neat, but it could have unintended consequences that would alienate the user base (especially the crypto-native participants who are adversarial to centralization and burdensome KYC).

Instead of trying to police every angle or ban every kind of insider that could influence the results, operators should focus on verifying information, dispute resolution, and transparency that let participants (and those who derive actionable information from these markets) make sense of what’s happening without killing the market’s dynamism.

Second, traders and analysts must change their mental models. Traditional edge hunting (e.g. arbitrage, latency advantages like steam chasing) will always exist, but the more valuable practice for both bettors and security analysts is to develop methods for fusion: overlaying odds with AI/decision models and human expertise to evaluate whether movement reflects genuine information or manipulation. That’s why at BetBreakingNews we aim to publish tri-lens analyses: what markets price, what AI models predict, and what experts and insiders (including folks who know or would use Dare Market-type services) say. The intersection of these views helps you triage which market moves to trust, which to investigate, and which to treat as noise.

Third, national-security and corporate risk teams should integrate BETINT into their warning indicators. When monitored systematically, they can point to emergent threats or to areas that warrant immediate human follow-up. If a market on a targeted strike or a supply-chain failure jumps suddenly, that’s a cue to rapidly assess vulnerability and posture resources for defense/security accordingly.

Fourth, we need to think hard about bounty and dare-style mechanisms. They’re not inherently bad. Dares can spur innovation (“I dare you to win a Nobel Prize”, “I dare you to be the first human on Mars”), but they can just as easily incentivize reckless or malicious actions. When these interact with event markets, they create hybrid arbitrage opportunities between the cost of executing an act and the potential payout from the event market. Operators and policymakers need to study these dynamics, limit distortions that cross into unsafe territory, and when they can’t stop them, build ways to counter or mitigate them.

With all that said, the bottom line is this: non-kinetic intervention is real, inevitable, and consequential. Ignoring it is not an option. Trying to ban it outright will backfire. The better path is to understand it, measure it, and incorporate it into how we design markets, run investigations, and build intelligence. Treat prediction markets as signal generators, but with eyes wide open to who is on the “playing field” and what levers they can pull. That’s what BETINT must be: disciplined, cautious, operationally useful, and another tool in the intelligence stack.

If you’re a bettor, understand that the sharpest signals come from the intersection of money, expertise, and action. If you run or verify markets, recognize that your choices around verification, liquidity, and dispute resolution are shaping the future of public forecasting and the real-world consequences that come from them. And if you’re in national security or law enforcement, hear me clearly: even if your instinct is to ban or regulate these markets out of existence, don’t ignore them. That was the U.S. government’s mistake with TikTok—they addressed how to deal with the negative effects of the platform as a legal problem instead of an influence problem. These markets aren’t going away, so better to understand them now than be caught flat-footed later. We can try to stamp out every intervention, or we can accept that interventions will happen and work to make them visible, accountable, and maybe even useful. Personally, I’d dare us to choose the latter.

By Dan Zimmermann (Verse Gaming) and Sean Guillory (BetBreakingNews.com)

When Polymarket announced that it had secured CFTC approval to launch in the United States, the immediate question wasn’t just when it would launch (though there is a Polymarket market on that) it was what Polymarket would show up on American soil. The company has been teasing its U.S. rollout on its site, but the fine print is already clear: Polymarket US won’t look like the wild, crypto-driven, offshore marketplace that captured headlines during the 2024 election cycle. In fact, it will be an entirely separate platform.

And that raises our central question: Will Polymarket US actually still be Polymarket?

What Made Polymarket “Polymarket”?

To even ask that question, we need to define what Polymarket is.

The offshore Polymarket is (and still is) a crypto-only prediction market, semi-anonymous (no KYC and one would need a chain analysis solution to trace activity to someone) where just about any topic is fair game. It has run markets on geopolitics, civil wars, celebrity gossip, and yes, sometimes uncomfortable topics that no U.S.-regulated operator would ever list.

It’s also a place where insiders feel comfortable betting. Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman famously said “there is no such thing as insider trading on Polymarket”, and he wasn’t wrong because the lack of U.S. regulation allowed bets on privileged information in a way that would never fly on Wall Street.

Add in Polymarket’s public blockchain ledger where every trade can be tracked, analyzed, and memed in real time and you had a perfect storm of transparency, audacity, and cultural relevance.

This cocktail made Polymarket the clear leader in prediction markets until January 2025, when Kalshi seized the spotlight when they started to run more sports focused prediction markets. Polymarket’s identity is to push boundaries and that defiance was part of its charm.

The U.S. Pivot: Sanitization by Necessity

After purchasing little-known DCM provider QCEX in July and receiving CFTC approval in September, Polymarket is preparing to go live in America. As of mid-September, Polymarket was in the final compliance phase, sending updated oversight and conduct manuals to regulators for review (per Dan Bernstein).

But legitimacy comes at a cost:

• Offchain. CFTC regulators, despite their flexibility, have not yet approved any onchain (read: Blockchain powered) platforms as financial institutions. That will remain with Polymarket’s conditional approval.

• KYC and insider bans. Like Kalshi, Polymarket US will need to adopt strict prohibitions on certain users. The days of anonymous insider trading on Polymarket are over.

• Content sanitization. Markets on civil wars, military strikes, or violent crime suspects will be more heavily scrutinized because the CFTC explicitly outlaws (1) “activity that is unlawful under any Federal or State law,” (2) “terrorism,” (3) “assassination,” (4) “war,” (5) “gaming,” or (6) “other similar activity ... determined by rule or regulation, to be contrary to the public interest.”

• Payments. To attract mainstream users, Polymarket US will almost certainly need to support fiat deposits otherwise it would be leaving money on the table.

In other words, the things that made Polymarket unique (its edgy markets, crypto-native anonymity, and an irreverent tone) will likely disappear on the US exchange. Which leads us back to the question: if Polymarket US strips away those traits, what remains? And why would someone choose it over Kalshi?

The Competition Problem

Kalshi has already established itself as the buttoned-up, regulator-friendly alternative. It’s gone toe-to-toe with the CFTC in court (and won) to offer political contracts. It has leaned hard into sports, even as it faces lawsuits from tribal and state regulators for its sports markets (per Dustin Gouker). And it’s even building a crypto ecosystem of its own to make up ground with the crypto-native community - most of whom favor Polymarket’s platform.

So if Polymarket US plays by the same rules, with the same fiat rails, the same regulatory guardrails, and none of the offshore bravado…how does it stand out?

Sure, Polymarket raised $255 million in June. They may be on the verge of another massive raise right now. They can buy attention, at least for a while. But will they be anything other than “Kalshi, but blue”?

Why Even Bother with the U.S. Market?

There’s another awkward question here: why does Polymarket even want to re-enter the U.S. at all?

It’s an open secret that VPN access to the current offshore Polymarket is easy. Unlike sportsbooks that deploy tools like GeoComply to lock down regions, Polymarket is relatively porous. Sharps, insiders, and crypto enthusiasts already know how to access it.

So who is Polymarket US really for? I think we can make an educated guess:

• (25%) Recreational bettors with fiat wallets. The folks who aren’t crypto-native but want to dabble in politics, entertainment, and pop culture.

• (25%) Normies who don’t want to skirt the law. Users who would never use a VPN but might download an app if it looked legit. Call them the casual predictors.

• (50%) Sports bettors. Polymarket rarely emphasized their sports markets as a core selling point before Kalshi started flirting with CFTC approval for sports markets. Now, that’s all they advertise.

Our bet is that Polymarket is primarily aiming to take the sports betting throne.

If that’s the target, then Polymarket US can’t just be a watered-down version of its international cousin. It has to actively reimagine itself.

Betting on The Favorites

Polymarket is the league leader in edgy markets. Want to bet on Israel to bomb Iran again? You can. Want to bet on the sexual orientation of criminals? You can. Want to bet on a dildo making a surprise appearance at the next WNBA game? Be their guest.

But what Polymarket is truly chasing with this move to the US is a piece of the sports betting action that Kalshi has shown to be a lucrative opportunity.

Sports betting regulations are inherently fragmented. States develop unique frameworks, with quirky particulars - like no credit card depositing in Massachusetts or no betting on NY colleges inside New York. Despite their flaws, state gambling commissions have brought the industry from their infancy to a true mature ecosystem with competition and responsible gaming standards.

But companies like DraftKings have payed over $40 million dollars to offer their regulated, against the house sportsbook in 25 states - and that doesn’t include legal fees and compliance obligations.

Kalshi has slammed a federal door in the face of state regulators across the gaming industry with their sports prediction markets.

For a company that literally argued sports are prohibited categories for CFTC exchanges to offer in the past, they sure are confident in their approach now. So confident, in fact, that they have now launched player prop markets in 50 states - a feature only brought to you historically by sportsbooks and sportsbook DFS clones.

Polymarket is simply driving down the lanes that Kalshi paved through their lobbying efforts and cozy connections. With Donald Trump Jr. now an investor in Polymarket and an advisor in Kalshi, it’s reasonable that both companies are feeling quite comfortable with their current risk appetite around sports markets.

Although Kalshi has generated significant buzz around their sports trading products since kickoff of the NFL season in September, Polymarket must believe that they can be a dominant player in the world of sports ‘predictions’.

And they are probably right. The appetite for two way sports markets that let users trade in and out of positions live in-app is a serious upgrade to the user’s capabilities and experiences over traditional sportsbooks.

That being said - there are significant limitations on what CFTC prediction markets can do when it comes to mimicking the user experience and betting experience on sportsbooks. I write more about this here - but to save you a click, it comes down to customization and retention.

Sportsbook custom parlay builders generate the vast majority of revenue - and critical retention features like in-app bonus currency, odds boosts, and injury protections make up the reasons that players keep coming back to their sites. Prediction markets will have neither.

However, Polymarket aims to continue the Kalshi-born trend of pushing CFTC regulators to the absolute brim. But the bet they are making on freedom of motion in sports and elsewhere is not necessarily a slam dunk. There are potential questions being asked around these platform’s ability to operate, and the allies they hoped to have may not reach their desired target.

All that being said, it’s a good bet that Polymarket is interested in competing with not just Kalshi - but DraftKings, FanDuel, and the rest of the regulated sports betting cabal.

RIP VIPs

Polymarket may be making their triumphant return to the US with their eyes fixed on the sports betting prize - but that certainly is not their sole focus or target. The introduction of mainstream betting on the Oscars, Heisman Trophy winner, and the top artist on Spotify will hold real value in a world constantly gamifying itself.

There is plenty of potential for users to enjoy the US experience, free from the requirement of VPNs and crypto wallets.

But the most passionate Polymarket users? They won’t touch it.

Why? Simple. KYC’d financial institutions are the antithesis of the web3 culture.

Kalshi has been getting slammed online for pretending to be a crypto company despite that never being true. Being onchain means something to millions of people who have learned to use crypto as their native language.

That’s what I mean when I say Polymarket’s user base is crypto native. It’s not because they don’t like fiat - it’s because they don’t trust it.

Players wagering serious wagers ($10,000-$1m+) are not interested in governments being able to track those transactions. The tax implications of registering an account with Polymarket USA alone is enough to turn off whale-sized bettors. Why risk the IRS (or what remains of it) knowing about a single cent you win on your ‘Does Trump say ‘tremendous’ winnings?

And whale traders are not the only type of traders that an onchain Polymarket appeals to. The real fuel that flames the fire of Polymarkets is that there is always the risk (or opportunity) that true insiders are participating in the market.

Take for example, the Israeli strike on Hamas officials in Qatar in September. The Polymarket for if Israel strikes Qatar in 2025 saw insider activity spike the price hours before the attack - and it wasn’t the first time an insider placed action down on strikes before they happened.

On a US Polymarket, neither that market nor that user would be eligible or safe from the law.

Conclusion

With no insider incentive to take anonymous action and no ‘tax free’ stablecoin withdrawals, a CFTC approved Polymarket loses much of its charm overnight.

So will Polymarket US truly be Polymarket? No, not really.

But does that preclude it from being extremely successful at what it will do best? Absolutely not.

Just don’t expect the top 100 wallets, or even the top 10,000 wallets, to make the migration to Polymarket US.

With this realization of what this CFTC approval could provide, we are seeing prediction markets that were once offshore like Polymarket moving back onshore after receiving CFTC approval. We are seeing sports betting giants like FanDuel and financial exchanges like Crypto.com and Robinhood getting into prediction markets. And trust me when I say that there are MANY MORE prediction markets being in the past few months (shout out to the Prediction Index for keeping up on listing them).

That’s the market reason to launch now, but my inspiration comes from seeing firsthand in national security how underappreciated, misunderstood, and unprepared our government is for non-kinetic attacks in the cyber, information, and cognitive domains.

Getting trustworthy information has never been more difficult. Deepfakes, disinformation campaigns, the collapse of moderation guardrails, and governments pushing their preferred slant as the only acceptable version of reality; this is the information landscape we’re all forced to navigate. For years, the default answer from policymakers and academics has been to call for “better media literacy.” But what does that actually mean? Where’s the curriculum and tools? Recommended tactics like pre-bunking or inoculation strategies might work for governments and platforms that control distribution, but what about the everyday citizen, the sharp bettor, or even the analyst who doesn’t have that kind of megaphone?

Prediction markets cut through that in a different way. They reward accuracy. They force people to put skin in the game. And when money moves, it creates signals. Those signals when paired with expert insight and AI forecasting tools can often reveal sharper, timelier, and more actionable truths than consuming the news as-is.

This is why we are launching Bettingintelligence.ai with this mission: grow the worldwide non-sports/world-event betting ecosystem so that bettors—wherever they are, whatever their preferred stake size, and whatever topic they want to bet on—can reliably find a betting institution ready to take their action.

That may sound like a tall order, but that’s the scale of what we need. I want to help all the players in the ecosystem—not just bettors, not just casinos/books/prediction markets (what I shorthand as “betting institutions”), and not just the companies trying to sell tools and services into the space. To build a mature, global ecosystem, we need to connect them all. That’s how you create timely, actionable insights and reward the people providing real value. My partnership motivation is simple: those who provide accurate forecasts, timely intelligence, or insider signals deserve to be rewarded for it.

To bettors whose main edge is arbitrage, sniping stale lines, or past-posting on a market where the results are public but the market hasn’t gotten to closing it yet, what I’m building may not offer much for you. No hate at all for that strategy (markets need it) but my focus is on those whose insights, actions, and positioning actually move markets because the intel that these markets can bring is my motivating principle.

At Betting Intelligence, the work will come together through articles and analysis that take three lenses: (1) what the betting markets and books are pricing, (2) what AI and decision science models predict, and (3) what experts and insiders are saying. That comparison will be the foundation of our coverage. Around it, we’ll explore markets that should exist but don’t yet, review which information sources prove accurate over time, interview operators and superforecasters, and break down the tools and services that can help both bettors and institutions sharpen their edge.

On subject matter, we’re focused on world events, politics, security, finance, and technology. We’re going to hold off on celebrity or entertainment gossip (unless it crosses into politics), and we won’t do much discussion on sports (there are already so many fantastic resources for handicapping and plenty of betting institutions to choose from no matter the sport or league). No disrespect to those market genres, but we will only likely cover things related to those topics when they illustrate an interesting principle or mechanism that we’d want to discuss further like insider trading or “non-kinetic interventions in event-driven markets,” a concept I’ll dig into in a future piece.

For the betting community, think of this site as both an analyst desk and a concierge service. We’ll connect you to markets, tools, and experts that can help, and we’ll help you find reliable betting institutions willing to take the bets you actually want to make.

For betting institutions, we’ll provide a bridge to high-value bettors, give you visibility into the markets your customers want, and connect you with expertise to sharpen your lines.

For companies, campaigns, or organizations, we’ll help you translate betting signals into actionable intelligence.

For everyday citizens just trying to make sense of the chaos, we’ll spotlight tools and communities that cut through the noise so you can do whatever you need to do with the intel (e.g. make money, vote informatively, decide to leave your country, etc.).

And to those who know me from the national security world—through my writing on cognitive warfare, my work in unconventional conflict, or the MAD Warfare podcast—here’s why this matters to you. Betting intelligence or BETINT (so sorry for another “INT” for the stack) is going to be critical for operational assessments, if it isn’t already.

The same mechanisms that incentivize someone to throw green dildos at a WNBA game can just as easily incentivize someone to throw green grenades at critical infrastructure. We’ve already seen cases where those with foreknowledge of military strikes placed bets that signaled what was coming before traditional futures markets caught on. If you are an intelligence-focused organization and you aren’t already incorporating betting markets into your warning intelligence, you’re operating at an asymmetric disadvantage. To ignore this space is to miss where influence, action, and money are converging. And thinking you can regulate or ban it out of existence is wishful thinking (As Bill Ackman publicly tweeted, “There is no insider trading on Polymarket”). That genie is already out of the toothpaste tube.

So that’s the vision for Betting Intelligence, at least in this “Version 1” of our mission. The space is moving so fast that I’ll likely update it again in a few months. But for now, here’s the bottom line: if you care about accurate signals, actionable intelligence, and the future of non-sports betting, you should care about what we’re building here.

If you think we can be of help, or if you want to be part of building this ecosystem, reach out:
Email = sean@betint.ai
X Account = @betbreaknews
Sean’s LinkedIn Account = https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-guillory-cog-neuro/