32 BTC Sale Clouds $20M Polymarket Pool Resolution

Strategy, the bitcoin treasury company led by Michael Saylor, disclosed in an SEC filing that it sold 32 bitcoin between May 26 and May 31. The filing states the sales generated about $2.5 million and were the company’s first reported bitcoin sales since December 2022. The transactions took place during the time window covered by a Polymarket binary market that asked whether Strategy would sell any bitcoin before May 31. That market attracted more than $20 million in trading volume.

Traders are split over how the market should be resolved. Traders favoring a “Yes” outcome point to the SEC filing, which records the sales within the market’s deadline. Traders arguing for “No” contend the sale information was not publicly available at the moment the market closed and reference Polymarket rules that require resolution based on information available at market close. One participant wrote in the market comments: “The market should have been closed on the specified date. At the time of the market closure, the information was missing, so ‘No.'”

Polymarket has resolved the market to “No” twice; both resolutions were challenged and the dispute is now in a final review stage. If the disagreement is escalated further, it could move into the platform’s contested-market resolution process, which can involve token-based voting by holders of the UMA token.

A recent analysis of contested markets reported that more than 60% of active UMA voters over the past year could be linked to platform accounts, that in nearly one in five disputes at least one voter had a financial stake in the outcome, and that in most disputes more than half of votes came from the ten largest wallets.

Platforms that run prediction markets have previously faced disputes over whether to judge outcomes by when an event occurred or by when verifiable evidence of the event became publicly available. The Polymarket dispute over Strategy’s 32 BTC sale is the latest case presenting that operational question.