Maduro & Polymarket: Does Someone in the Crowd Have an Edge They Shouldn’t?
Jan 9, 2026
8 min read
Author
Maxime Pasquier, Principal @ Blackwood
Returning from the Christmas break brings the usual office debrief. Amid the standard small talk, a conversation with my colleague Rasmus stood out. He’d just finished reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. He reminded me of a story I hadn’t thought about in years: in 1907, Francis Galton wandered through a country fair collecting 787 guesses of an ox’s weight. When he averaged them, the crowd came eerily close to the truth. Surowiecki turned this into the book’s opening parable: under the right conditions, groups aren’t just smarter than lone experts, they are quietly lethal at getting reality roughly right.
Prediction markets like Polymarket are essentially Galton’s ox with a matching engine and a worse UX. Instead of scribbling guesses on slips of paper, you buy contracts that pay 1 if something happens and 0 if it doesn’t. A price of 0.63 implies a 63 percent crowd consensus. In theory, it’s Surowiecki’s dream: diverse views, real money, fast feedback, and a scoreboard that updates faster than most journalists can spell “probability.”
And then comes the Nicolás Maduro capture.
An anonymous account drops what looks like lunch money into a Polymarket contract, and walks away with over $400,000 just hours later when the operation goes live. Commentators (myself included) were tempted to ask whether this was truly a vibes-based macro insight. It looked less like the wisdom of the crowd, and more like someone sitting the exam with a cheat sheet.
In equities, trading on material non-public information is insider trading, and tends to end in perp walks and HBO documentaries... In prediction markets, the rules are greyer and way less clearer. Some platforms talk about banning insiders, regulators grumble about fraud and manipulation, and Axios dryly notes that much of this is “generally not against the law.” The result is a strange in-between world where betting on a secret military operation can be both wildly profitable and technically “legal-ish,” depending on your jurisdiction and your lawyer’s hourly rate.
The deeper problem, if you care (or are at least intrigued by) crowd wisdom, is not fairness alone, it’s signal quality. Galton’s crowd worked because everyone was guessing at the same opaque reality from different vantage points, and the errors canceled out. Once a small group knows the outcome in advance and everyone else is just providing liquidity, the market stops aggregating information and starts laundering it. At that point, praising the predictive power of “the crowd” is like admiring the foresight of a roulette wheel glued on 0. Another point Surowiecki raises in the book is the concept of cascading, which is detrimental to “true” independent prediction markets. Essentially, what we in VC call group-think or herding mentality; no independent research or avenues of information explored by the actor themselves, but merely following the tendencies of the marked… food for thought.
My optimistic take is that this is fixable. With clearer bans on insider participation, tighter question design, and real-time monitoring, these platforms don’t need to become side hustles for people with security clearances. My pessimistic take is that as long as power and information remain concentrated, any market that rewards early insight will attract people who aren’t guessing at all.
Galton’s ox was impressive because no one had weighed it in advance. The Maduro contract, by contrast, looks uncomfortably like someone bringing a scale to the fair, and then congratulating themselves on their forecasting skill…
Painting: Quentin Matsys’ “The Money Lender and His Wife” (1514)
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