“A Coinbase CEO prank resolved one market with a single sentence. Ackman’s warning about “rigged odds” in a $22 million Polymarket election shows the opposite: it now takes institutional-scale money to move prices even 10%.”, — write: www.coindesk.com
It was a thin market, where the largest winner took home only $111, according to Poymarket Analytics.
But if Armstrong’s impromptu word salad showed how ridiculous prediction markets can get, the New York City mayoral market, with $22 million in open interest, shows how serious they’ve become. Moving the odds there by just 10 percentage points would now cost roughly $1 million in concentrated buying power.
That’s because Polymarket’s open interest reflects real money sitting in a liquidity pool, not just the sum of theoretical wagers waiting to settle. Every trade interacts with an automated pricing curve backed by collateral, meaning odds shift gradually rather than being set by direct matches between traders.
The biggest positions show just how deep that pool runs: whales like “dubdubdub2” and “asfgh” each hold over $2 million backing Zohran Mamdani, according to Polymarket Analytics, while most of the large “No” traders are already sitting on heavy losses and have little room to add capital.
Because of this, any new bet placed “out of the money”, for example, buying Andrew Cuomo at long odds or selling Mamdani near 95%, is quickly absorbed by the market maker’s curve, which adjusts prices based on supply and demand.
To move the odds by 10 percentage points, a trader needs to push through millions of dollars in opposing orders, around $1 million in concentrated buying or selling, before the curve starts to meaningfully shift. The market’s size and structure make small attempts at manipulation almost instantly diluted by existing capital.
Recent polling backs up the market’s view. A Fox News survey shows Mamdani leading Cuomo by 16 points, while an Emerson College poll puts his advantage at 25, evidence that his 95% odds reflect voter sentiment rather than manipulation.
Perhaps there was also a misunderstanding that polls measure what voters say they’ll do, while prediction markets measure how confident traders are that those voters will actually do it, so a candidate polling at 50% doesn’t necessarily have a 50% chance of winning.
Ackman’s criticism missed what traders already knew: if Mamdani’s 95% odds were truly inflated, anyone could have exploited the mispricing.
Loading…
As CSPTrading.eth put it, right now a bet on Mamdani is just a guaranteed 5% return in 10 days.
Stablecoin payment volumes have grown to $19.4B year-to-date in 2025. OwlTing aims to capture this market by developing payment infrastructure that processes transactions in seconds for fractions of a cent.
View Full Report
The immediate focus is whether Dogecoin can stabilize above $0.18 and avoid further declines.
- Dogecoin fell 5.5% to $0.1843 after breaking below the key $0.1940 support level due to institutional selling.
- Trading volume surged by 180%, indicating significant distribution pressure in the crypto market.
- The immediate focus is whether Dogecoin can stabilize above $0.18 and avoid further declines.
Read full story