Polymarket suitgate: Zelenskyy’s NATO look divides crypto bettors

By admin On Jul 1, 2025

Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction market, has a market that was predicting whether or not Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would “wear a suit before July.”

This market was supposed to resolve positively if Zelenskyy “is photographed or videotaped wearing a suit between May 22 and June 30, 2025 ET.”

This market has become extraordinarily controversial after Zelenskyy appeared at an event wearing a non-traditional suit.

Zelenskyy attended a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) event on June 24 in a jacket and pants that appeared to be cut from the same fabric, though with a somewhat less traditional shape than classic Western tailoring.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) noted in an update on the event that “Zelenskyy swaps military fatigues for black suit at Nato summit.”

The New York Post ran a headline that stated, “Zelenskyy ditches t-shirt for a suit for sit-down meeting with President Trump.”

Even Polymarket Intel, an official Polymarket account, described a video of Zelenskyy’s arrival as “President Zelenskyy in a suit last night.”

Yet, despite many entities, including an official Polymarket account, declaring it a suit, it still seems as though the market may resolve to claim that “No.”

How does Polymarket decide it’s a suit?

Users can bond their assets to the UMA oracle related to that market and suggest a resolution. Initially, users suggested this market should resolve to “Yes.”

Other users can dispute this resolution for a brief window after it’s proposed by bonding their assets as a challenge.

There was an initial dispute that challenged the “Yes” resolution, with a large number of UMA users stating that it was too early to resolve this market.

This resolution means the disputant receives their bonded assets back, as well as half the bonded assets of the person who initially proposed the “Yes” resolution. The original proposer loses their bonded assets.

The next phase will be another proposal for the outcome and likely another final dispute where users will bond their assets to vote on the outcome. It’s not entirely clear how this will end up resolving.

Polymarket, the protocol, has no view of reality, and working as designed will simply resolve the market according to the decision of the oracle — even if the oracle ends up making a decision that appears to run contrary to the stated description of how the market should resolve.

However, there have been other markets in which Polymarket, the firm, has intervened. An earlier market debated whether or not DOGE would “cut $3b of DEI contracts before March.”

This market was meant to resolve to “Yes” if doge-tracker.com showed more than $3 billion in cuts to DEI contracts.

This tracker did end up showing large savings, but the market closed, and all losses were refunded, not because the resolution condition wasn’t met, but because Polymarket decided that doge-tracker.com itself wasn’t a reliable source.

What these two separate cases reveal is the tension between the users of Polymarket, the users willing to bond for UMA oracle disputes, and Polymarket, the firm, which intends for Polymarket to seem more decentralized than it has been in the past.

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