It took Polymarket less than 24 hours to turn the Middle East war into a trading floor.
Since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on Saturday, prediction markets have seen a flood of new contracts pop up covering everything from ceasefire timetables to whether the Iranian regime will fall by June.
The speed and specificity of the market are staggering. Bettors are betting not just on whether the conflict will escalate, but also on the week it ends, who will replace Khamenei and whether U.S. ground troops will enter Iran before March 7.
Polymarket’s largest completed market is “Will Khamenei become Iran’s supreme leader on March 31?” The resolution rate reached 100% after Iranian state television confirmed his death.
The contract’s trading volume reached $45 million, making it one of the most heavily traded geopolitical markets in the platform’s history. The top trader, whose account is named “Curseaaaaaaa”, made $757,000 on the “yes” bet. Four other traders cleared six figures each.
The market’s chart hovered between 25% and 50% during January and February as tensions mounted, before surging vertically to 100% after confirmation passed.
The action has now moved on to the next step.
The ceasefire market believes that the possibility of a ceasefire between the United States and Iran before March 2 is only 4%, and the possibility of a ceasefire by March 6 is 15%. However, by March 31 and April 30, this possibility jumps to 61% and 78% respectively. Punters are pricing in a resolution in weeks rather than months, consistent with Bitcoin’s rally to $68,000 on the same argument.
“Will the Iranian regime collapse on June 30?” The proportion currently stands at 54%, a significant increase from around 20% in several months. The “Next Supreme Leader of Iran” market has a 30% chance of “abolishing the position” entirely, meaning punters have almost a one-in-three chance that the theocratic structure itself will not survive. Former parliament speaker Ali Larijani leads the nominated candidates with 21% of the vote.
Ground invasion contracts also drove actual volume. “Will the United States invade Iran before 2027?” trades at 19% for $207,000, while “U.S. troops enter Iran on March 7” trades at 28% for $2 million.
What Polymarket is doing here is something that traditional markets are structurally unable to do. Stocks and oil futures won’t reopen until Sunday night, but on Polymarket anyone with a cryptocurrency wallet can take a position on Iran regime change over a casual weekend and see real-time pricing from thousands of other players doing the same thing.
But perhaps the most dramatic activity occurred before the first missile hit the ground.
On-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps found on Saturday that by February 28, the day of the attack, six wallets had made a combined profit of $1.2 million by betting on a U.S. strike against Iran.
Most wallets obtained funds within 24 hours of the attack, betting specifically on the February 28 contract rather than the broader time frame, and purchased “yes” stocks hours before the military operation began. The largest single wallet converted approximately $61,000 into over $493,000 in profit. The second person netted approximately $120,000 from the $30,000 position.
At the same time, the platform also understands optics.
Polymarket added a note to its Middle East listing on Sunday, noting that “the promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased predictions for society’s most important events,” adding that after speaking with people directly affected by the attacks, it found that prediction markets “can give them the answers they need in a way that TV news and X cannot.”
