When U.S. Delta Force commandos slipped into Venezuelan airspace over the weekend, they did so in secrecy. And yet, in the hours before President Donald Trump gave the final order for the strike, someone bet more than $20,000 that Nicolás Maduro would be ousted as the country’s leader by the end of January.
On Polymarket, the online platform that lets people wager on almost anything, an anonymous trader somewhere in the world placed a series of suspiciously well-timed bets. Using a fresh account created last month, the individual made just a few bets in the days leading up to the raid, according to The Wall Street Journal—all on the possibility of imminent regime change in Venezuela—and appeared to come away with more than $400,000.
Perhaps the bettor just got phenomenally lucky. Or perhaps they knew about the raid ahead of time and leveraged it for a quick payout. We can’t know, because Polymarket, a so-called prediction market where people turn their idle hunches into real cash, allows some of its customers to remain anonymous. Traders place their bets using crypto, which could provide another layer of cover. The Maduro trade has generated a huge amount of speculation and controversy; the internet is now full of jokes that Barron Trump, hunched behind dual monitors in his NYU dorm room, may have been behind it.
This is not the first instance of a well-timed bet on Polymarket raising questions about insider trading. Just before María Corina Machado, a leader of Venezuela’s opposition to Maduro, was declared the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, the probability that she would win the award began to spike on Polymarket (despite a highly secretive selection process). The Nobel Institute has said that it may have been a victim of espionage. Early last month, a trader made a series of bets related to Google’s most popular searches of 2025. Just before the company released its “Year in Search” report, the user bet on some of those top searches with uncanny accuracy. In the end, the account netted more than $1 million.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/venezuela-maduro-polymarket-prediction-markets/685526/
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