The very first thing many Ukrainians verify within the morning will not be Instagram or e-mail, it’s a warfare map. DeepStateMap.Reside, a volunteer-built OSINT undertaking, reveals which villages are below occupation, the place Ukrainian advances maintain, and the place the entrance appears to be like fragile. It’s a survival instrument as a lot as a information product, funded by donations and backed by a cooperation settlement with the Ministry of Protection to maintain its view of the battlefield correct.
Now think about that very same map, draped over a shiny 3D globe referred to as PolyGlobe, with little icons marking Polymarket contracts like “Will Russia seize Huliaipole by December 31?” While you hover over the guess, the precise neighborhood lights up. The realm the place somebody’s dad and mom dwell is the world the place another person has “Sure” odds priced to a few decimal locations.
That’s the dichotomy this story lives in: a wartime public good on one facet, and a crypto prediction platform with real-money wagers on captured cities on the opposite.
In late November, a Ukrainian tech outlet reported that Pentagon Pizza Watch, the pseudonymous group behind PolyGlobe, had built-in DeepState’s API straight into its war-betting dashboard with out permission. The map, the article stated, was being pulled right into a Polymarket visualization instrument in order that merchants may see shaded management zones, unit icons, and assault arrows straight below their warfare bets, a “first-of-its-kind OSINT market tracker” constructed on high of another person’s wartime infrastructure.
DeepState UA, the group behind the map, reacted inside hours. In a public assertion relayed by native media and social channels, they stated they’d by no means approved any betting service to plug into DeepStateMap and referred to as using their work in warfare playing unacceptable, including that third events have been in all probability accessing the information by a free API meant for humanitarian and army wants or through scrapers.
Pentagon Pizza Watch apologized and eliminated the combination, claiming they assumed a public endpoint was honest sport. Whereas comparatively transient, the difficulty opened a deeper query that goes nicely past one plugin: what occurs to open wartime instruments when crypto markets begin treating them as uncooked materials for bets, whereas each Ukrainian and Russian households bury the lifeless from drone strikes and artillery fireplace?
When the frontline turns into a futures contract
Polymarket has leaned arduous into geopolitical and warfare markets. Based on reporting from dev.ua, in November, there have been roughly 100 lively contracts tied to the Russia–Ukraine warfare, from whether or not Russian troops would seize Pokrovsk or Myrnohrad by 12 months’s finish to when a ceasefire would possibly lastly maintain, with about 97 lively warfare bets and practically $96.8 million in quantity. A dealer clicking into these markets finds language that appears extra like a guidelines appendix than a discussion board about human lives.
In a number of contracts, Polymarket explicitly names the Institute for the Examine of Conflict’s interactive Ukraine map as the first decision supply and DeepStateMap.Reside as a backup if ISW turns into unavailable. If each maps go offline, the plan is to fall again to a “consensus of credible reporting.” In different phrases, the frontline map tens of millions of Ukrainians use to know whether or not their village is below occupation is written into the nice print of an on-chain on line casino as a sort of oracle of report.
Supporters of prediction markets will say that is the purpose. Their pitch is that you just crowdsource possibilities from folks keen to place cash on the road, the markets digest all accessible data, together with dwell OSINT feeds, and what comes out is a cleaner learn on the long run than any political pundit can ship. For long-term macro questions or election odds, that argument at the very least matches the standard “knowledge of crowds” story.
However warfare is a special class. Somebody checking Polymarket to see if a ceasefire has a 5% or 10% worth this month is consuming a monetary product. Somebody checking DeepStateMap to see whether or not Russian artillery is close to their city is attempting to determine if they’ll drive their children to high school, simply as somebody in Kursk or Belgorod is attempting to determine whether or not Ukrainian drones are going to hit a gas depot close to their residence.
This can be a battle that has already left tens of 1000’s of civilians lifeless. Totally different sources report totally different numbers, however the consensus is that there are greater than 50,000 recorded civilian casualties in Ukraine alone, and certain nicely over one million troopers on either side killed or wounded. One facet of the market is taking dangers voluntarily, whereas the opposite is uncovered to violence forcefully. When the 2 collapse into the identical stack of instruments, a few of the distance that usually separates hypothesis from real-world hurt disappears.
The PolyGlobe integration pushed that logic to its pure endpoint. The dev.ua report quotes the Pentagon Pizza Watch group saying that geographic warfare markets “always confuse folks,” and that draping DeepState’s map over their globe would clear that up by letting customers hover over a area and see “the precise space of the transaction the place it’s being resolved.” No extra quibbling over whether or not a station actually counts as “captured,” simply zoom in and watch the map repaint in near-real time as troops transfer. It’s a neat little UX trick for a dealer, and a stomach-turning one if that shaded district occurs to be the place somebody you understand is serving.
To be clear, Polymarket didn’t write the PolyGlobe code and by no means claimed to be scraping DeepState’s API. Its warfare markets, although, sit on the heart of an orbit of instruments and plugins which can be, and the platform units the essential incentive construction that makes these instruments worthwhile.
When a third-party dashboard wraps humanitarian OSINT round Polymarket markets, it’s doing so to extend buying and selling quantity, appeal to extra customers, and make the playing smoother for folks speculating on the seize of Ukrainian cities or the autumn of one other Russian-held village.
That’s not an unintended facet impact of an harmless instrument, simply the enterprise mannequin doing precisely what it was designed to do.
When public items meet personal odds
DeepStateMap is a high traffic, high-stakes data supply: by early 2024, the map had been considered greater than a billion instances, with each day site visitors within the a whole bunch of 1000’s, and its group works with the Ukrainian army to cross-check frontline data so civilians and troopers can see the place the combating truly is.
Whereas a lot of the focus is on Ukrainian territory, the identical warfare has introduced drone and missile assaults to frame areas in Russia, Crimea, and the Black Sea, killing and injuring civilians there as nicely; the UN has documented a whole bunch of civilian casualties in Western Russia and occupied Crimea linked to this battle, even with out full entry to Russian-controlled areas.
It’s funded by a mixture of donations and authorities assist, and its API is deliberately oriented towards humanitarian makes use of, journalists, and civil protection. When DeepState UA says that “systematic makes an attempt at unauthorized use” are forcing them to tighten API entry, transfer to individualized keys, and spend time on mental property enforcement, they aren’t solely speaking concerning the annoyance of a scrape.
Each hour spent policing degens is an hour not spent bettering the map, hardening it towards DDoS, or constructing higher overlays for air raid patterns and artillery vary on both facet of the border. It pushes a volunteer-heavy group into gatekeeping mode, reviewing requests and yanking keys, as an alternative of treating their information as a shared public utility.
The larger danger right here is that, below sufficient abuse, tasks like DeepState conclude that open endpoints are extra bother than they’re price. They’ll lock the API behind closed partnerships, decelerate refresh charges, or degrade granularity within the public model. That could be rational self-defense for the group, however it appears to be like very totally different if you’re an NGO discipline employee, an area journalist, or a household attempting to make route choices based mostly on the place the entrance seems to be.
Polymarket’s personal report doesn’t make this pressure simpler to swallow. Earlier this 12 months, the platform handled a $7 million controversy over a market on whether or not Donald Trump would safe a mineral cope with Ukraine. The contract settled “Sure” though no such settlement materialized, after a big holder of UMA governance tokens reportedly used their voting energy to push by that end result. If enormous monetary stakes can twist a distinct segment geopolitical market a couple of hypothetical Trump deal, it isn’t arduous to think about related video games round warfare contracts that depend on delicate frontline adjustments.
That doesn’t imply prediction markets don’t have any place in battle evaluation. Teachers and coverage varieties have experimented with war-related contracts for years, typically inside managed, low-stakes environments, to gauge expectations about outcomes like peace agreements or sanctions.
The Polymarket model of that is totally different in at the very least two methods: the cash is massive, with nearly $100 million traded throughout Russian–Ukrainian warfare markets in a single month in response to Ukrainian press, and the expertise has been tuned for retail gamblers. The result’s a hybrid product that borrows the language of “data markets” however feels, to the folks whose lives sit below these worth charts, like a sportsbook, simply with higher branding.
There’s a extra fundamental query hiding beneath all of this. Whose consent issues when turning a public map of a warfare into infrastructure for monetary bets? The corporate that made it? Ukrainians? Russians?
DeepState UA constructed its undertaking to assist Ukrainians orient themselves in a battle that has displaced tens of millions and killed tens of 1000’s of civilians, whereas Russians are additionally dropping kinfolk and associates to a warfare launched of their title that now sends Ukrainian drones towards their houses. The group has made it very clear that they don’t wish to be a part of a wagering economic system round territorial loss.
Polymarket and its satellite tv for pc instruments, in contrast, function from a crypto tradition the place all the things that may be priced might be, and the place “degen” is worn as a badge quite than a slur. For one set of communities, warfare is an existential actuality; for the opposite, it’s a volatility supply with an RSS feed.
The episode with PolyGlobe will fade from the information cycle. Pentagon Pizza Watch has already taken down the DeepState integration and promised to not contact the information with out express permission. Polymarket’s warfare markets will preserve buying and selling, with their references to ISW and DeepState sitting within the rulebooks, and a recent crop of customers will preserve discovering that they’ll guess on the destiny of cities they’ve by no means heard of.
The actual query is what will get left behind when prediction markets transfer from “Who wins the election” to “Who loses their house this quarter,” whereas Russia retains firing cruise missiles at Ukrainian residence blocks and Ukraine retains launching drones into Russian cities that have been as soon as removed from any entrance line.
If humanitarian mapping tasks determine that betting platforms are parasitic, the probably transfer is to retreat: extra friction, extra locked-down information, fewer open feeds. That will frustrate degens, however they are going to discover one thing else to gamble on. The individuals who can not route round that withdrawal are the civilians who rely on clear, quick, open intelligence to navigate their days of their war-forsaken cities.
Conflict betting defenders will say that markets solely mirror actuality, that odds on a ceasefire or a breakthrough in Donbass are simply numbers. However these numbers are painted over their actual locations the place actual folks dwell, and each guess written towards that backdrop appears like yet one more small reduce to the delicate belief that retains civilians sharing data and volunteers updating maps. The darkish facet of Polymarket’s warfare video games is the sluggish corrosion of a digital commons created to assist folks survive a warfare, now compelled to spend its time defending itself from those that would flip that warfare right into a sport.