Polymarket Nobel Peace Prize Controversy: Data Leak Likely Involved Web Scraping

Polymarket Nobel Peace Prize Insider Hints at Website Scraping Data Leak

The surprising rise in Maria Corina Machado’s odds of winning the Nobel Peace Prize on Polymarket hours before her official victory announcement sparked speculation about possible insider trading. Even so, the answer to this mystery might be hidden in plain sight.

Fhantom Bets, a Polymarket user, hosted an X space with one of the alleged insiders who took advantage of the information, getting interesting revelations on the source of the data. While the insider did not disclose the source of this info, he did hint at using web scraping, a process that scans websites for underlying information from their code.

He insisted that the privileged information leading to his bet was “accessible to anyone,” and stressed that “you can brute force your way into a lot of things,” commenting on trying a similar approach to find an advantageous position in similar prediction markets before.

Fhantom Bets stressed that there was public material on the Nobel Prize website that indicated Machado’s win in the early morning before the announcement. “It’s possible that 12 hours earlier, the available information on these webpages only hinted that Machado was one of possibly multiple winners,” he assessed.

Nonetheless, other users speculated that the human element could not be ruled out, as the developer who managed the website could also have leaked the info to people outside the organization.

Machado did not figure as a favorite in the week leading up to the election. The opposition leader, who once declared that bitcoin would be a key component in restoring the country’s financial reserves, was awarded the prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”