---
type: source
title: "Newly-created Polymarket accounts profited from US-Iran ceasefire bets hours before announcement"
author: "Euronews / NPR / Bloomberg"
url: https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/04/09/newly-made-polymarket-accounts-won-massively-on-us-iran-ceasefire-bets
date: 2026-04-09
domain: internet-finance
secondary_domains: []
format: article
status: null-result
priority: high
tags: [prediction-markets, polymarket, insider-trading, iran, information-aggregation, belief-2-challenge]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

On approximately April 7-8, 2026, at least 50 brand new Polymarket accounts placed substantial bets on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire in the hours — even minutes — before President Trump announced the ceasefire on Truth Social.

Specific accounts documented:
- One wallet: $72,000 bet → $200,000 profit
- One trader: $13,200 stake → $463,000 (35x return)
- Three accounts collectively: ~$600,000 profit on ceasefire bet
- Bubblemaps identified 6 suspected insider accounts that collectively netted $1.2M on Iran strikes

Pattern context:
- January 2026: Anonymous Polymarket account profits $400,000 betting on Maduro removal hours before his capture
- March 2026: "Magamyman" account turned $87K into $553K betting on Iran strikes 71 minutes before news broke
- March/April 2026: P2P.me team traded on own ICO outcome using nonpublic VC commitment information

Regulatory/institutional response:
- White House issued internal email (March 24 — before the ceasefire) warning staff that using privileged information in prediction market trading is a criminal offense
- House Democrats sent letter to CFTC Chair Selig (April 7) demanding action, with response requested by April 15
- Bipartisan "PREDICT Act" (Preventing Real-time Exploitation and Deceptive Insider Congressional Trading Act) introduced March 25 to ban officials and their families from trading on political-event prediction markets
- Republican Rep. Blake Moore: "It is highly unlikely that these are good-faith trades"

Polymarket removed the market for downed U.S. pilots and acknowledged the lapse. Polymarket and Kalshi both updated rulebooks to align with federal insider trading rules.

The White House warning included context about oil futures: roughly 15 minutes before Trump's de-escalation post, $760M+ in oil futures changed hands — the prediction market signal was part of a broader financial market information leakage.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is the most significant empirical challenge to Belief #2 I've found in the session series. The "skin-in-the-game" argument for why prediction markets aggregate information better than polls assumes the information being bet on is dispersed private knowledge. When the information is classified government intelligence (ceasefire timing, military strikes), prediction markets become insider trading vectors rather than information aggregation mechanisms. The mechanism is operating — but on the wrong epistemic population.

**What surprised me:** The March 24 White House warning — BEFORE the ceasefire event. This means the administration had already internally acknowledged the insider trading pattern, making the April ceasefire trading more damning: they warned staff and the trading happened anyway. The White House warning is institutional acknowledgment that prediction markets are information leakage risks, not just aggregation tools.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Any evidence that the prediction market prices on Iran actually IMPROVED the information environment (i.e., that the prices reflected genuine new information that improved policy decisions). The case for information aggregation would be strengthened if one could show that the market prices informed anyone who wasn't already an insider. No such evidence found.

**KB connections:**
- `information-aggregation-through-incentives-rather-than-crowds` — DIRECT CHALLENGE to this claim
- `polymarket-election-2024-vindication` — The 2024 election vindication used dispersed-knowledge events; Iran ceasefire is concentrated-knowledge event; important scope distinction
- `congressional-insider-trading-legislation-for-prediction-markets-treats-them-as-financial-instruments-not-gambling-strengthening-dcm-regulatory-legitimacy` — Torres bill evolving; PREDICT Act is bipartisan and broader

**Extraction hints:** Primary claim: Prediction markets' information aggregation premise requires a dispersed-knowledge scope qualifier because they also incentivize monetization of concentrated government intelligence. Secondary claim: The sequential pattern (Maduro, P2P.me, Iran strikes, Iran ceasefire) is evidence of a systemic insider trading vector, not isolated incidents. These are two distinct claims — the first is theoretical/structural, the second is empirical.

**Context:** Polymarket is offshore (not US-regulated), so CFTC's jurisdiction here is limited. This creates an asymmetry: Kalshi operates under CFTC rules that would theoretically prohibit insider trading, while Polymarket's offshore status makes enforcement difficult. The Iran trades happened on Polymarket. This adds a "regulated vs. offshore" dimension to the insider trading problem.

## Curator Notes

PRIMARY CONNECTION: `information-aggregation-through-incentives-rather-than-crowds`
WHY ARCHIVED: Sequential insider trading pattern (Maduro Jan, P2P.me Mar, Iran Apr) is the strongest empirical challenge to Belief #2's dispersed-knowledge premise; White House institutional warning is confirmatory institutional signal
EXTRACTION HINT: The theoretical claim (scope qualifier for dispersed-knowledge premise) is higher priority than the empirical pattern claim; draft scope qualifier claim first, then use this source as evidence for the empirical pattern; flag as potential divergence candidate against existing KB information aggregation claims
