Polymarket is manipulated by the Oracle Machine! Over $7 million bet on the "right is wrong" losers winning money.

An oracle manipulation incident in Polymarket sparked community discontent, with more than $7 million in the prize pool being misjudged, resulting in a large number of correct bettors losing a lot of money, and instead the wrong betting users took the prize pool funds. The incident exposed a vulnerability in Polymarket's decision-making mechanism and raised questions about UMA's voting mechanism. (Synopsis: Polymarket was shocked to see the "2025 Jesus Coming" prediction gambling market, and the community ridiculed: Can the money won in gambling be taken to heaven? (Background added: XRP jumps 10%" Ripple says SEC is about to abandon appeal, Polymarket estimates that the probability of passing XRP spot ETF breaks 80% this year) Polymarket, a prediction market that shined during the U.S. election, suffered its worst oracle manipulation attack since its founding. The incident resulted in more than $7 million in incorrect prize pool results, and in the end, users who had bet on the correct outcome not only failed to receive their prizes, but suffered heavy losses. Background of the incident and judgment mechanism The incident occurred in a prediction pool about whether Ukraine will reach a rare earth trading agreement with Trump before April, according to the reality, the United States and Ukraine have not yet reached an agreement, so the result of the prediction pool should be "no". However, before settlement, the prediction pool's results unexpectedly showed as "yes", which eventually led to false judgments and caused a large number of users to miss out on bonuses. The root cause of this misjudgment is that Polymarket relies on the UMA (Universal Market Access) oracle to determine the outcome of the event. UMA relies on community voting to decide the outcome of the event through a decentralized approach, however, this mechanism does not effectively prevent external manipulation, which led to the occurrence of this event. YOU MUST STOP BETTING ON @Polymarket Polymarket has scammed its users once more. The event outcomes are determined by a group of influential users who secure positions and then vote in their favor, regardless of the actual results. Check out this market:… pic.twitter.com/OxcVmr0B3v — MARMOT (@Web3Marmot) March 25, 2025 UMA Voting System and Manipulation Risk Polymarket's determination mechanism has three main steps: Results reporting: Anyone can report results to UMA after an event has occurred. Dispute Period: If someone believes that the report was wrong, they can file a dispute. UMA Voting: UMA token holders vote on the final outcome and punish honest behavior and wrong votes. However, UMA's voting mechanism imposes a penalty of only 0.05% on wrong votes, which makes market manipulation extremely inexpensive and gives people the space to manipulate results. In this case, the voting process showed that millions of UMAs were thrown into the "yes" option, forcibly changing the voting results. According to Reddit users, in the early days of the vote, the option "it's too early to draw conclusions" used to lead, but then it was overturned by a large number of UMA votes, and finally chose "yes". In the process, the price of UMA also skyrocketed by 24% on March 22, and then gradually retreated, hinting at a possible manipulation plan behind it. Low-cost manipulation and official response Polymarket's official response to the incident was that it was aware of the incident, but because the incident did not constitute a system failure, the user could not be refunded. Officials noted that such a situation was unprecedented, and an emergency meeting was being held with the UMA team to ensure that similar incidents would not happen again in the future. In addition, officials said that they will improve the monitoring system and enhance the reliability of the system, but the specific measures have not yet been announced. However, such a response did not quell the anger of users. Many users in the community expressed disappointment with the official approach, noting that this low-penalty voting mechanism would lead to more manipulative incidents. The comment section under the original prediction pool accumulated a large number of comments, and the mood of the community was high, and many users questioned Polymarket's ability to effectively solve such problems. "POLYMARKET IS NOT A POLL!!" Yes. That's a feature… not a bug. — Polymarket (@Polymarket) March 24, 2025 Polymarket's Forecast Accuracy and Bias According to research by Alex McCullough, a data scientist in New York, Polymarket predicts certain events with close to 90% accuracy. He analyzed Polymarket's historical data and removed those markets whose results were known but had not yet been settled to maintain the accuracy of the analysis. McCullough found that Polymarket slightly overestimated the probability of an event in most cases, which could be related to participants' psychological biases, such as a crowd mentality versus a preference for high-stakes betting. Long-term markets are more accurate because they tend to involve unlikely events, making forecasting simpler. Related reports Polymarket was shocked to see the "2025 Jesus Coming" prediction gambling market, and the community ridiculed: Can the money won in the gambling be taken to heaven? XRP jumps 10%" Ripple said SEC is about to abandon appeal, Polymarket estimates that the probability of passing XRP spot ETF this year breaks 80% Fed two hawkish governors change their attitude towards Crypto, Polymarket predicts that the probability of US bitcoin reserves will rise by 43% (Polymarket is manipulated by oracles! More than $7 million bet on "right and wrong" loser wins" This article was first published in BlockTempo's "Dynamic Trend - The Most Influential Blockchain News Media".