One of the underrated challenges of running a platform like Polymarket, on which users speculate and bet on possible outcomes of future events, is how to connect them back to reality — that is, deciding, and deciding how to decide, what actually happened in the end. Much of the time, this isn’t too complicated, either in theory or in the specific written context of the market. If you’re guessing the Pacers will beat the Hornets this week, for example, you can reasonably expect Polymarket’s resolution to match the score you see on TV or, as this market specifically cites, the recorded result on NBA.com.

The rules written by Polymarket account for other contingencies, too. “If the game is postponed, this market will remain open until the game has been completed,” the site says. “If the game is canceled entirely, with no makeup game, this market will resolve 50-50.” Even rare possibilities are well accounted for here: If a rock fell from space and obliterated the Spectrum Center mid-game, that would be a surprising and horrible tragedy, but Polymarket users wouldn’t feel cheated (except, perhaps, by the cosmos).

Spectator sports, which have rules and referees and take place within sanctioned competitions, make things pretty easy for prediction markets; establishing and recording how sporting events have resolved is the whole point and something leagues have had lots of time to think about. But while sports account for the majority of action on Polymarket, the purview of the platform is, in the words of its founder, a bit like a news outlet in that it wants to “cover whatever is going on.” The rise of prediction markets around elections — a phenomenon that’s at least a little sportslike — has gotten the most coverage, but the platform has opened markets around countless real-world outcomes for which the range of possibilities is a bit wider and weirder. Like, for example, a market created in September last year around the question “Will the U.S. invade Venezuela by …?”

On the matter of whether the United States “invaded” Venezuela when it captured and removed the country’s leader, killing at least dozens of people in the process, after which President Trump said “we” will “run the country,” well, reasonable people can disagree. And so can Polymarket users, especially the ones who had money on whether an “invasion” would happen by December 31, an outcome the site has officially resolved: Didn’t happen. 

The surreal maybe-invasion of Venezuela had already been made stranger by prediction markets in other ways. Hours before the surprise operation, a fresh account placed separate bets on Nicolás Maduro’s ousting that paid out around........

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