On April 7, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran. On April 21, with the ceasefire set to expire the day after, he posted a statement on Truth Social, announcing that the ceasefire would be extended indefinitely.

Subsequently, Reuters, AP, BBC, Al Jazeera, and The Wall Street Journal all reported that the ceasefire had been extended in the same way. Iran’s foreign minister tweeted to acknowledge the decision to extend the ceasefire.

In the real world, the ceasefire has continued under strict lockdown conditions.

But on Polymarket, the market “Will the US-Iran ceasefire be extended before April 22” currently has a probability of “Yes” of 0.1%.

That is to say, everyone in the world knows the ceasefire has been extended, yet the largest prediction market in the world believes that it has not been extended.

At this point in time, markets with controversy often see bets placed with expectations of 100x profits: some traders bet as little as one dollar, or even hundreds of dollars, trying to create a get-rich-quick myth.

And within the past 24 hours, an account bought $100,000 worth of “Yes,” with potential returns exceeding $50 million.

Will the ceasefire be extended—officially, or not?

The controversy in this market was embedded in the rules from the very beginning.

Polymarket’s definition of “ceasefire extension” is: it requires both sides of the US and Iran to make clear, explicit public statements, or reach a “consensus among overwhelmingly credible media reports.” The US’s public statement comes from Trump himself on Truth Social.

The problem is Iran. Iran’s official remarks used the word “acknowledged,” rather than the “mutually agreed” required by the rules.

It is exactly this wording that led to a split in trading volume of up to $150 million in this market: “Yes” holders believe that Trump’s statement plus the unanimous reports from global media already constitutes an “overwhelming consensus”; “No” holders believe that Iran did not directly confirm on its own behalf, so the condition has not been met.

On April 24, Polymarket’s official team stepped in directly and added an explanation on the market page: as of 23:59 on April 22, there is no ceasefire extension that satisfies the “Yes” condition.

With official endorsement, market sentiment flipped sharply, and the probability quickly fell below 1%.

What followed was a number of traders active in the late hours who are well-versed in game rules and trading strategies: under the official determination, buying “No” has effectively become an almost zero-risk, high-yield way to manage money.

Among these people, the top three “No” holders include one account called NotBakerMcKenzie, placing a bet of about $8.5 million. Baker McKenzie is a top-tier global law firm headquartered in Chicago, specializing in compliant legal services for prediction market clients such as Polymarket, with deep understanding of oracle settlement mechanisms and platform rules.

Interpreting the rules as a law firm and placing hard cash bets seems like it is effectively declaring to the entire trading community which direction this market will ultimately settle in.

However, the top “Yes” holder, Pedro, clearly sees it differently: Polymarket’s official statement can only serve as a reference for settlement; the actual outcome is determined solely by the UMA decentralized oracle voting. As long as UMA token stakers’ votes support “Yes,” what the officials say is irrelevant.

This is exactly what Pedro is betting on: compared with potential returns of more than $50 million, risking $100,000 to bet on a surprise outcome from the oracle vote is extremely worthwhile.

An oracle attack worth $50 million

On Pedro’s Polymarket account homepage, there is a link. When opened, it leads to a website for a token he issued himself—$pedros-coin. Although the site is filled with unfinished-looking architecture and rough page design, the token’s design rules are highly eye-catching.

$pedros-coin cannot be purchased using conventional meme rules. The only way to obtain it is through action: watching a live stream earns 1 coin per hour, posting content on social media earns 20 coins per post—all acquisition methods are tightly tied to network dissemination.

The value of this token depends entirely on what the “Yes” probability is in the “ceasefire extension” market. If the probability is 100%, each token is worth $1; if the final settlement is “No,” the token is worthless.

Pedro’s holdings in this market also perfectly function as a guarantee of token compensation—he holds 50 million “Yes” shares, with potential compensation exceeding $50 million. He only gets paid if he wins and can then redeem.

When you combine these features, the logic of the design becomes clear: Pedro uses $pedros-coin to link the interests of hundreds of people with his own “Yes” position, motivating them to keep producing voices across the entire internet. The goal is to create enough public pressure before the oracle vote so that as many stakers as possible believe that this market “should settle as Yes.”

From a narrative perspective, this mobilization mechanism has a kind of strange web3 spirit—Pedro invests more than $100,000 of real money, leading retail users to unite through tokens earned by taking action, to fight the reality that large holders can sweep up and decide outcomes with capital. And the direction they bet on in reality does correspond to a real, existing ceasefire.

But something else appears in Pedro’s Discord channel, making the story no longer so pure.

Naive Pedro and the oracle-whale market manipulator

On the morning of April 30, a user named Euan posted a message in the Discord channel listed on Pedro’s personal webpage: “As you can see, I own the richest UMA wallet. Willing to accept bribes to manipulate the vote to be ‘Yes.’ DMs open.”

Two screenshots were attached next to the message: one showing the holding of 2.9 million UMA tokens, and the other an account page named borntoolate.eth.

2.9 million UMA tokens account for about 16.4% of the current total staked 17.71 million UMA tokens.

Just that single screenshot is already enough to be convincing, and for players who have spent years in Polymarket, the name borntoolate carries no less weight than the figure of 16.4%.

In March 2025, the Polymarket market “Will Ukraine agree to Trump’s mineral resource deal by the end of March,” despite negotiations still ongoing and no formal signing having taken place, was settled as “Yes” by oracle vote.

This is the sensational Polymarket oracle attack incident. The mastermind behind it is borntoolate. With overall voting participation not particularly high, borntoolate pushed the settlement result forcibly toward “Yes” by holding and staking a large amount of UMA tokens, using relative weight to steer the outcome—making the market run fully counter to reality.

The core assumption of UMA’s security model is that “the cost of an attack exceeds the benefits of an attack”—attackers need to buy enough UMA tokens to control the vote, and this cost should be greater than whatever gains they can obtain from the attack. However, the total market cap of the entire UMA protocol is only about $40 million.

We cannot verify whether Euan is truly borntoolate himself. But if the settlement result of this round flips again, Pedro’s $100,000 bet would bring a return of more than $50 million.

As of now, the results of the UMA oracle voting appear to be fairly clear. Among the tokens with publicly available voting results, the “No” votes exceed 10.27 million, while there are only 25 “Yes” votes.

The only uncertainty in this round is the allocation of approximately 8.69 million UMA tokens whose votes have not yet been made public. If more than 2.33 million of them vote “No,” this round’s vote will be deemed to have reached consensus, and the market will settle as “No.” If it does not reach that threshold, this round’s vote will be considered invalid, and the controversy will continue into the next round—which is exactly the window Pedro is waiting for.

At the time of writing, Pedro is still continuing to buy “Yes.”

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