When the cost of corruption is lower than the return, the truth becomes a commodity sold to the highest bidder.
Author: Omer Goldberg, Founder of Chaos Labs
Translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow
When the cost of corruption is lower than the return, the truth becomes a commodity sold to the highest bidder.
The controversy surrounding the Polymarket lawsuit involving Zelensky is not a minor glitch. Rather, it is a fatal flaw in the $200 million human-controlled oracle: when the cost of corruption is lower than the return, the truth becomes a commodity sold to the highest bidder.
Zelensky's $200 Million Fashion Show
Imagine this: Zelensky walks into a NATO summit wearing what every major news outlet calls a suit. The market's trading volume is $200 million. The outcome seems obvious. Then, the UMA oracle cast a "no" vote.
This was not because Zelensky wasn't wearing a suit, nor because the evidence was unclear, but because those controlling the oracle bet tens of millions of dollars on the "no" vote; they only needed to leverage their voting power to rewrite reality without bearing any actual risk.
(Note: UMA is an open-source protocol, which stands for Universal Market Access. It relies on economic incentives and dispute resolution to ensure the accuracy of price data.)
Introduction to Oracle Manipulation
The unsettling fact about human-controlled oracles is that humans have biases.
Some of the largest UMA holders are significantly bullish on "no."
When the "yes" vote appears to be the correct outcome, they do not accept failure; they flip the voting result.
They cast over 23 million UMA, worth about $25 million, to challenge the outcome.
This is not decentralization. It is whales protecting their own interests. With enough UMA and coordination, the truth does not matter; the outcome does.
The Broader Oracle Crisis
This issue extends far beyond Polymarket and UMA. Human-controlled oracles are susceptible to various manipulations and incentive design traps.
While we use the Zelensky Suit Market as a case study, we note that we have previously observed this issue in the Ukrainian mineral trading market in March 2025.
Every major prediction market faces the same fundamental challenges.
When humans control the truth, the truth yields to human interests: Escape from human-controlled oracles: Replace intent with intelligence.
The only real solution to human oracles is to remove humans.
AI-driven oracles change this:
No economic incentives: Models do not hold positions or care who wins.
Bias-resistant decision rules: Same training weights, same prompts, same temperature = models score evidence against the same fundamental standards. AI has no emotions, no side bets, no behind-the-scenes coordination.
Reasoning pipeline: Every intermediate step can be recorded, inspected, and replayed.
Machine-scale throughput: Parallel ingestion of thousands of information sources, with no fatigue or side trading.
Residuals still exist, but they are random statistical noise. This is much harder for traders. With clear resolution standards and verified data feeds, state-of-the-art models have provided production-level accuracy, and the curve is improving sharply.
Residual noise beats computational lies
The future of prediction markets requires completely removing humans from truth determination.
This architecture looks like this:
Predefined source hierarchy: Reuters > BBC > Local news > Blogs
Cryptographic proof of data sources: Verifying that information has not been tampered with
Multi-agent consensus: Multiple AI systems reach independent conclusions
Transparent reasoning: Complete audit trails for every decision
Immutable evidence: Proof stored on a blockchain that cannot be modified or deleted
Truth discovery in a post-truth world
Prediction markets are a microcosm of a larger challenge. When Wikipedia can be edited, news can be modified, and "facts" can be negotiated, we need systems that can establish the fundamental truth of facts.
This encompasses the following areas:
Election integrity and verification
Scientific consensus and research validation
News authenticity in the age of deepfakes
Historical record preservation and anti-tampering
Corporate transparency and accountability
Final Thoughts
The choice facing prediction markets is stark: continue to pretend that incentivized humans can be neutral arbiters of truth, or establish a truth determination system that completely eliminates human bias.
The market itself has already answered this question. When $200 million flows into a market with an obvious outcome, and that obvious outcome fails, the system reveals its nature.
Truth discovery is too important to be auctioned to the highest bidder.
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