Will Khamenei go? Who will be the next Fed chair? And will the Bills win against the Broncos? Here we look into Polymarket’s crypto crystal ball

On Friday 16 January 2026, Polymarket’s homepage read like a single scrollable mood board for the global attention economy. At the top sat a stark geopolitical question, “Khamenei out as Supreme Leader of Iran by January 31?”, trading at about an 8% “Yes” with roughly $33 million in volume. A few tiles later came “Who will Trump nominate as Fed Chair?”, with Kevin Warsh around 60% and a chunky $197 million behind it.

Next, Portuguese politics, with António José Seguro (IND) priced at roughly 76% and $112 million traded. Then a territorial curveball, “Will Trump acquire Greenland before 2027?”, sitting around 17%. After that, the feed swerved into Bundesliga football, Call of Duty esports, two NBA match-ups, and a pair of NFL games.

That whiplash is the point

Polymarket is a cryptocurrency-based prediction market where users trade outcome shares, typically framed as “Yes/No” or as a set of named outcomes. In practice, it turns uncertainty into a live price, which many people read as a probability. Polymarket’s interface pushes this interpretation hard, showing a “chance” next to each market and sorting the front page by 24-hour volume, like a news site that measures importance in dollars rather than column inches.

So why have prediction markets become so popular? Partly because they are legible. A polling average can feel abstract, a forecasting model can feel priestly, but a traded price says: this is what participants think, right now, with money on the line. Partly because they are fast.

New information

Markets can incorporate new information immediately, without waiting for a new survey wave or an analyst note. And partly because the data has started escaping the crypto enclosure. Dow Jones has moved to incorporate Polymarket data across mainstream financial outlets, an institutional nod to the idea that prediction prices can function as a form of public sentiment telemetry.

The homepage’s top ten markets are also a neat taxonomy of modern speculation. The Iran wager is pure headline risk, the Fed Chair market is a Washington parlour game dressed up as macro, and the Portugal election tile is a reminder that “politics” on Polymarket is often “politics everywhere”.

The Greenland contract is the platform at its most meme-adjacent: a serious-sounding prompt that also reads like geopolitical fan fiction. Then come the sports markets, which are the prediction-market equivalent of comfort food, bounded, scheduled, and blessedly unambiguous at settlement.

Where does Polymarket get things right?

In domains where lots of people have information, incentives, and time to express a view, it can look impressively sharp. A recent showcase came via entertainment. Polymarket was integrated into the Golden Globes broadcast and, according to reporting, its markets correctly called 26 of 28 winners, which is the sort of stat that makes traditional forecasters briefly consider switching careers.

But prediction markets also supply their own cautionary tales, and some of the most revealing “misses” are less about forecasting failure and more about the messy interface between reality and resolution rules.

In early January 2026, Polymarket drew backlash for refusing to pay out markets tied to a purported US “invasion” of Venezuela, arguing that real-world events did not meet the contract’s definitions. Traders saw it as arbitrary. Critics saw it as inevitable: turning complex political events into binary outcomes is easy until it is not.

Spectacularly wrong

Then there are the spectacularly wrong forecasts, the kind that expose how thin information can be in secretive or chaotic settings. The 2025 papal conclave is a clean example.

Polymarket bettors reportedly backed favourites while the eventual winner, Robert Francis Prevost, sat at long-shot odds, around 1% in some accounts, before becoming Pope Leo XIV. For a platform marketed on crowd wisdom, it was a reminder that crowds cannot price what they cannot see.

Layered over all of this is the question of market integrity. Researchers have argued that headline-grabbing markets can still be only moderately accurate on aggregate, with some analyses putting Polymarket’s accuracy below certain rivals.

And even when markets are broadly efficient, they can be poked. Academics and analysts have documented attempted manipulations on Polymarket, some of which failed, but not before illustrating how thin liquidity and attention can make odd prices briefly look like truth.

Which returns you to that top ten

When a single front page can place “Iran regime change by 31 January” beside “49ers vs Seahawks”, it is tempting to dismiss the whole thing as just gambling with better typography. Yet the same feed is also a live map of what people think matters, what they think is likely, and what they are willing to pay to be right about. That is why prediction markets are spreading: they do not just predict events, they price the collective imagination, one contract at a time.