The Greek Trader@TheGreekTrader
Did @willo2_Poly really get scammed by Polymarket or was he just a greedy dude who full ported into 'free money' and got rekt?
Let's dive into it.
Yesterday I made a post explaining why I thought this market would resolve to NO while YES was trading at 65% (check the screenshot or my profile).
Long story short, based purely on the written rules, this looked like a YES resolution.
However, there was strong precedent for it resolving NO. A previous market with almost identical rules had been clarified so that information outside the market timeframe didn't count.
This was public information, although not easy for a newbie to find. It was immediately shared in the Polymarket Discord, which is why I always recommend being active there.
Another reason a YES clarification would've been bad is that we'd never know when a market is actually resolved.
The market timeframe was already over. If information that comes out days or weeks later that can change the outcome, how long are traders supposed to wait before considering a market settled?
There are already markets where confirmation arrives days or weeks later, yet they still resolve based on what was known within the timeframe. Changing that standard would create huge uncertainty and be disastrous for the platform.
Now back to Willo2.
Willo2 was buying thousands of shares that MicroStrategy sold Bitcoin by May 31, AFTER the news came out at 70%-80%. (he had a few shares already, that he had sold them before the news).
He saw that even though everyone knew MicroStrategy had sold the Bitcoin, the market was still trading around 70-80%, while markets for later timeframes, like June 30, were trading at 99.9% and he kept buying YES.
I think we can all agree this was a dumb and greedy move.
You always have to remember that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. You don't just go all in, on something that doesn't make sense, thinking you are smarter than everyone else.
And if there had been no ambiguity in the rules, Willo2 would never have been in this position because the market would've been trading at 99.9% immediately after the news came out, not 70%, when he was buying.
Anyway, no matter how Polymarket clarified this market, there was always going to be massive drama.
If they clarified YES, they would've gone against their own previous clarifications, which had created some level of consistency on the platform and all the sharp traders who traded based on that precedent would've been rekt.
The real reason for all this drama was the unclear wording of the market.
If the rules had explicitly stated that only the announcement itself mattered, it would've been clear.
Instead, the wording left room for interpretation about whether information outside the timeframe should count.
For me, Polymarket's biggest mistake was not clarifying the market before May 31. People had already asked for clarification specifically to avoid this exact situation.
My take is that it sucks that @willo2_Poly lost $500k and I genuinely hope he makes it back.
But he lost it mainly because he was greedy af.
The problem isn't that Polymarket resolved this market to NO.
The problem is that the rules were ambiguous enough that reasonable people could argue either side and they didn't clarify it days ago to prevent all of this.
