April 7th, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran. On April 21st, one day before the ceasefire was set to expire, he posted a statement on Truth Social announcing an indefinite extension of the ceasefire.

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

In the real world, the ceasefire has continued under a tight lockdown.

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

That is to say, everyone around the world knows the ceasefire has been extended, but on the largest prediction market in the world, people believe it has not been extended.

At this point in time, markets with controversy like this often attract bets that aim for hundredfold profits: some traders wager as little as one dollar or even hundreds of dollars, trying to create a fantasy of getting rich.

And in the past 24 hours, an account bought $100,000 worth of “Yes,” with potential gains of more than $50 million.

Officially stepping in to change the rules—has the ceasefire really been extended?

The controversy in this market is baked into the rules from the start.

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

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

It is 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 unanimous worldwide media coverage already constitutes an “overwhelming consensus”; “No” holders argue that Iran did not directly confirm on its own behalf, meaning the condition was not met.

On April 24th, Polymarket’s official account directly intervened and added a clarification on the market page: as of 23:59 on April 22nd, there is no ceasefire extension that meets the “Yes” criteria.

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

What followed were many late-traders who are well-versed in game rules and trading strategies: given the official framing, buying “No” has essentially become an investment with nearly zero risk and high returns.

Among these traders, the top three “No” holders include an account called NotBakerMcKenzie, placing a bet of about $8.5 million. Baker McKenzie is a top global law firm headquartered in Chicago, specializing in compliance legal services for prediction market clients such as Polymarket, and it has deep knowledge of oracle settlement mechanisms and platform rules.

Interpreting the rules as a law firm and then backing it with real money bets seems like an announcement to the entire trading community about where the final settlement of this market will end up.

However, Pedro—the top “Yes” holder—clearly sees it differently: Polymarket’s official statement can only be treated as a reference for settlement, and the actual outcome is decided solely by UMA’s decentralized oracle voting. As long as UMA token stakers’ votes support “Yes,” what the official says does not matter.

This is exactly what Pedro is betting on: compared with the potential payout of more than $50 million, betting $100,000 on a possible oracle-vote twist is extremely cost-effective.

Oracle Attack Worth $50 Million

On Pedro’s Polymarket account homepage, there is a link. When you open it, it leads to a website for a token he issued himself—$pedros-coin. Although the website is full of half-finished architecture and rough page design, the token’s design rules are very striking.

$pedros-coin cannot be purchased under the usual meme rules. The only way to obtain it is via action-for-exchange: watch live streams to earn 1 coin per hour, and post content on social media to earn 20 coins per post—every way of obtaining it is tightly tied to network dissemination.

And the token’s value depends entirely on what the “Yes” probability is in this market about whether “the ceasefire will be extended.” If the probability is 100%, then each token is worth $1; if the final settlement is “No,” then the token is worthless.

Pedro’s position in this market also perfectly serves as a token payout guarantee—he holds 50 million “Yes” shares, with potential payouts of more than $50 million. He only gets paid if he wins.

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

From the narrative perspective, this mobilization mechanism has a strange web3 spirit—Pedro puts in more than $100,000 of his own real money, leading retail users to unite with token rewards earned through action, to fight against a fait accompli where big holders sweep everything up with capital. And the direction they bet on in reality does correspond to a real ceasefire that exists.

But something else appears in Pedro’s Discord channel, making the whole thing less pure.

Playing dumb Pedro and the oracle whale manipulating the market with a posted price

On the morning of April 30th, a user named Euan posted a message in the Discord channel linked 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 alongside the message: one showing a holding of 2.9 million UMA tokens, and the other being a page for an account named borntoolate.eth.

2.9 million UMA tokens, roughly 16.4% of the current total staked 17.71 million.

Just this one screenshot is already enough to be impressive. And for players who have spent years in the Polymarket ecosystem, the name borntoolate carries no less weight than the number 16.4%.

In March 2025, the Polymarket market “Will Ukraine agree to Trump’s mineral resource agreement before the end of March” was settled by oracle voting as “Yes,” even though negotiations were still ongoing and there had been no formal signing.

This is exactly the sensational Polymarket oracle attack event. The instigator was borntoolate. With overall voting participation not high, borntoolate pushed the settlement result toward “Yes” by holding and staking a large amount of UMA tokens, using relative weight to force the market’s direction—completely at odds with the facts.

The core assumption of UMA’s security model is that “the cost of an attack is higher than the benefit of an attack”—attackers need to buy enough UMA tokens to control the vote, and this cost should exceed what they can gain from the attack. However, the total market capitalization of the entire UMA protocol is currently only about $40 million.

We cannot verify whether Euan is truly borntoolate himself. But if this round’s settlement result is flipped again, Pedro’s $100,000 bet would deliver returns of more than $50 million.

As of now, the outcome of UMA’s oracle voting looks fairly clear. Among the tokens with publicly revealed votes, the “No” side has more than 10.27 million votes, while the “Yes” side has only 25 votes.

The only variable in this round of voting is the ownership of about 8.69 million UMA tokens whose votes have not yet been revealed. If more than 2.33 million of those votes are “No,” then this round will be deemed to have reached consensus, and the market will settle as “No.” If it does not reach that threshold, then this round of voting will be considered invalid, and the dispute will continue into the next round—this is the window that Pedro is truly waiting for.

At the time of writing, Pedro is still continuously buying “Yes.”

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