It took Polymarket less than 24 hours to turn a Middle Eastern war into a trading floor.
Since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Saturday, the prediction market has seen a flood of new contracts covering everything from ceasefire timelines to whether the Iranian regime will collapse by June.
The speed and specificity of the markets is striking. Bettors are betting not only on whether the conflict will escalate, but prices for the week it ends, who will replace Khamenei and whether US ground forces will enter Iran by March 7.
Polymarket’s largest completed market is “Khamenei out as Iran’s Supreme Leader on March 31?” which resolved to 100% after Iranian state television confirmed his death.
The contract drew $45 million in volume, making it one of the most traded geopolitical markets in the platform’s history. The top trader, an account called ‘Curseaaaaaaa’, earned $757,000 on a Yes bet. Four other traders cleared six figures each.
The chart in this market hovered between 25% and 50% through January and February when the tensions arose, then skyrocketed to 100% when the confirmation came through.
Now the action has moved to the next.
The Ceasefire Market gives only a 4% chance of a US-Iran ceasefire on March 2nd and 15% on March 6th, but jumps to 61% on March 31st and 78% on April 30th. Bettors are pricing a resolution within weeks, not months, consistent with bitcoin’s termination at $68,000 on the same thesis.
“Will the Iranian regime fall before June 30?” is at 54%, a sharp increase from the low-20s where it had been trading for months. The “Next Supreme Leader of Iran” market offers a 30% chance of the “position being abolished” entirely, meaning players are seeing almost a one in three chance that the theocratic structure itself will not survive. Ali Larijani, a former Speaker of Parliament, leads the named candidates with 21%.
The land invasion contracts also draw a lot. “Will the US Invade Iran Before 2027?” is trading at 19% with $207,000 in volume, while “US forces enter Iran on March 7” is at 28% with $2 million traded.
What Polymarket does here is something traditional markets structurally cannot do. Stock and oil futures don’t reopen until Sunday evening, but on Polymarket, anyone with a crypto wallet can make a decision on Iranian regime change on a casual weekend and see real-time prices from thousands of other participants doing the same.
But the most striking activity may have occurred before the first missiles landed.
Onchain analytics firm Bubblemaps on Saturday identified six wallets that collectively made $1.2 million in profits by betting on a US attack on Iran by February 28, the exact day the strikes took place.
Most wallets funded within 24 hours of the attack, bet specifically on the February 28 contract rather than broader timeframes, and bought “yes” stocks hours before the military operation began. The largest single wallet turned about $61,000 into over $493,000 in profit. Another brought in about $120,000 from a $30,000 position.
Meanwhile, the platform pays attention to the optics.
Polymarket added a note to its markets in the Middle East on Sunday, saying that “the promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts of the most important events for society,” adding that after speaking to people directly affected by the attacks, it found that the prediction markets “could give them the answers they needed in ways that TV news and X couldn’t.”
