Many people seem to be assuming some sort of bias on Polymarket's part. Without evidence, these seems unlikely as whichever side of the bet wins, Polymarket makes the same amount of $. That is, they have no stake in the outcome. The only time you can blame them is if they pay out to neither side and pocket all funds at stake. Which, as far as I can tell, no one is accusing them of.
> pay out to neither side and pocket all funds at stake
That's also not possible, as far as I understand. If the smart contracts are worth their salt, the only possible outcomes per binary option is to pay out in full to either "yes" or to "no" holders, not to any other unrelated party, including Polymarket.
The real risk is somebody subverting a sufficiently large proportion of (anonymous, stake-based) arbiters on UMA, which is the on-chain entity that actually arbitrates outcomes and as such releases funds to one side or the other. Then, somebody could buy the "wrong" outcome tokens for cheap and flip the payout their way.
No idea how feasible that is and which game-theoretic protections UMA/Polymarket have against that possibility, but I don't think we've seen a smoking gun for that yet.
Maybe I don't understand it enough, but I don't see how it's hard at all to manipulate this with a lot of money. Buy a lot of the wrong resolution, and all the other individuals will be too afraid to buy the right one.
Not quite, Polymarket is decentralized so they are even more removed from the outcome. When a dispute happens like this, a vote happens in the UMA DAO, essentially a decentralized "democratic" vote. What people are complaining about is UMA whales skewing votes.
