While the Polyglobe tool allows users to bet on all of Polymarkets’ geopolitical prediction markets using a map, those relating to war raise questions. Are such features ethical?
Polyglobe allows users to bet on global conflicts via an interactive map
Among the major trends of 2025, prediction markets occupy a prominent place by allowing users to bet on anything and everything. Anything and everything is precisely what we are talking about, with a certain category of bets highlighted in recent days by Numerama.
Pentagon Pizza Watch has developed Polyglobe, an interactive virtual globe displaying all the geopolitical bets around the world available on Polymarket.
In theory, the feature could be particularly interesting, offering an instant geographical overview of prediction markets such as “Will Anaïs Belouassa-Cherifi win the 2026 municipal election in Lyon?” or “No change in Bank of England interest rates before the February 2026 meeting?”
The downside is that this tool also allows users to visualize a number of armed conflicts around the world, giving the appearance of strategy games to very real wars, such as the one in Ukraine:
In the example above, each blue dot corresponds to a prediction market such as “Will Russia capture Lyman in 2025?” or “Will Russia enter Toretske before December 31?” Here, the focus is on Ukraine, but similar bets can be found for a number of conflicts, particularly in the Middle East.
This raises several issues. Would it be appropriate to ban such bets when human lives are at stake? In a decentralized world resistant to censorship, such an idea would be counterproductive, but the fact that users launch and use prediction markets like these raises serious moral questions.
Furthermore, if someone is to be blamed, who is at fault? For example, Pentagon Pizza Watch’s Polyglobe tool simply maps bets available on Polymarket. Polymarket does not allow users to create their own markets; these are actually added by the team in response to sufficient demand on X or Discord.
In fact, Polyglobe has been live since September, and the questionable bets highlighted in this article are not new either. Nevertheless, they show the excesses that some players can indulge in when it comes to making money.
