The very first thing many Ukrainians examine within the morning is just not Instagram or e mail, it’s a warfare map. DeepStateMap.Dwell, a volunteer-built OSINT mission, exhibits which villages are below occupation, the place Ukrainian advances maintain, and the place the entrance appears to be like fragile. It’s a survival device 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 known as PolyGlobe, with little icons marking Polymarket contracts like “Will Russia seize Huliaipole by December 31?” Once you hover over the wager, the precise neighborhood lights up. The world the place somebody’s mother and father dwell is the realm the place another person has “Sure” odds priced to 3 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 workforce behind PolyGlobe, had built-in DeepState’s API instantly into its war-betting dashboard with out permission. The map, the article mentioned, was being pulled right into a Polymarket visualization device in order that merchants may see shaded management zones, unit icons, and assault arrows instantly 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 means of native media and social channels, they mentioned they’d by no means approved any betting service to plug into DeepStateMap and known as the usage of their work in warfare playing unacceptable, including that third events have been in all probability accessing the info by means of a free API supposed for humanitarian and navy 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 problem 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 hearth?
When the frontline turns into a futures contract
Polymarket has leaned arduous into geopolitical and warfare markets. In response to 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 yr’s finish to when a ceasefire may 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.Dwell 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 high quality print of an on-chain on line casino as a type of oracle of document.
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 out there 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 no less than suits the standard “knowledge of crowds” story.
However warfare is a unique 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 resolve if they will drive their children to highschool, simply as somebody in Kursk or Belgorod is attempting to determine whether or not Ukrainian drones are going to hit a gasoline depot close to their residence.
It is a battle that has already left tens of hundreds of civilians lifeless. Completely different sources report completely different numbers, however the consensus is that there are greater than 50,000 recorded civilian casualties in Ukraine alone, and certain nicely over 1,000,000 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 number 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 workforce saying that geographic warfare markets “continually 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 middle of an orbit of instruments and plugins which are, 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, entice 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 unintentional facet impact of an harmless device, simply the enterprise mannequin doing precisely what it was designed to do.
When public items meet personal odds
DeepStateMap is a heavy-traffic, high-stakes data supply: by early 2024, the map had been seen greater than a billion instances, with day by day site visitors within the a whole lot of hundreds, and its workforce works with the Ukrainian navy to cross-check frontline data so civilians and troopers can see the place the preventing really is.
Whereas many 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 lot 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 in regards to the annoyance of a scrape.
Each hour spent policing degens is an hour not spent bettering the map, hardening it in opposition to DDoS, or constructing higher overlays for air raid patterns and artillery vary on both facet of the border. It pushes a volunteer-heavy workforce into gatekeeping mode, reviewing requests and yanking keys, as a substitute of treating their information as a shared public utility.
The larger threat right here is that, below sufficient abuse, tasks like DeepState conclude that open endpoints are extra hassle than they’re value. They’ll lock the API behind closed partnerships, decelerate refresh charges, or degrade granularity within the public model. That is likely to be rational self-defense for the workforce, however it appears to be like very completely different if you’re an NGO subject employee, a neighborhood journalist, or a household attempting to make route choices based mostly on the place the entrance seems to be.
Polymarket’s personal document doesn’t make this rigidity simpler to swallow. Earlier this yr, 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 means of that end result. If big monetary stakes can twist a distinct segment geopolitical market a couple of hypothetical Trump deal, it’s not arduous to think about related video games round warfare contracts that depend on refined frontline modifications.
That doesn’t imply prediction markets haven’t any place in battle evaluation. Lecturers and coverage sorts 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 completely different in no less than two methods: the cash is huge, with virtually $100 million traded throughout Russian–Ukrainian warfare markets in a single month in keeping with 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 mission to assist Ukrainians orient themselves in a battle that has displaced tens of millions and killed tens of hundreds of civilians, whereas Russians are additionally shedding kin and associates to a warfare launched of their identify that now sends Ukrainian drones towards their properties. The workforce 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 the whole lot that may be priced shall be, and the place “degen” is worn as a badge moderately 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 info with out specific permission. Polymarket’s warfare markets will preserve buying and selling, with their references to ISW and DeepState sitting within the rulebooks, and a contemporary crop of customers will preserve discovering that they will wager on the destiny of cities they’ve by no means heard of.
The true query is what will get left behind when prediction markets transfer from “Who wins the election” to “Who loses their residence 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 resolve that betting platforms are parasitic, the seemingly 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’t 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 wager written in opposition to 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 pressured to spend its time defending itself from those that would flip that warfare right into a sport.
