Prediction Traders Rapidly Wagered on Maduro's Ouster

Traders on a popular crypto-based prediction site spent Friday night rapidly rewriting the odds on Venezuela's leader losing power this month, the Wall Street Journal reports. On Polymarket, a site where users wager on political and world events, the implied probability that President Nicolás Maduro would be out of office by Jan. 31 had been sitting near 5% to 6% for about a week, according to the platform's data. That started to shift late Friday: the odds nudged up to 8.5% before 10pm Eastern, hit 12.5% just before 1am Saturday, and then began a sharper climb around 1:15am. The moves came as the US directed American commercial aircraft to leave Venezuelan airspace around midnight.

Bets on Maduro's political fate have become a sizable market on the site. Roughly $56.6 million had been wagered across at least six contracts tied to his departure, including about $11 million on whether he would be gone by Jan. 31. Earlier contracts speculating he would be out by Nov. 30 or Dec. 31 attracted about $40 million combined but ultimately settled as losses for those predicting his earlier exit. The January contract has seen wide swings before: it briefly priced the odds of Maduro leaving as high as 24.5% on Dec. 17, the day after President Trump ordered a blockade on sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela.

Overnight Friday into Saturday, traders appeared unsure which way events would break. Around 1:45am, the Jan. 31 contract was at roughly 50–50. Shortly after 2am, it suggested a two-thirds chance Maduro would be out by month's end. By 4:10am, sentiment had reversed, indicating about a 63.5% probability he would still be in power. Within roughly 10 minutes, the market swung dramatically again, assigning a 95.5% chance that Maduro would be ousted by Jan. 31. NPR reports one trader wagered $32,000 hours before Trump ordered the operation that seized Maduro, and that user ended up making about $400,000, leading some online sleuths to attempt to figure out the bettor's identity and whether insider trading might have been involved. A House Democrat quickly introduced legislation to bar government officials from trading on such sites in response to the profits made by some traders after Maduro's capture, Axios reports.