Polymarket conflict wagers intersect with the maps utilized by civilians for survival.

For many Ukrainians, the first thing they check in the morning is not their Instagram or email, but rather a war map. DeepStateMap.Live, a volunteer-driven OSINT initiative, displays which villages are occupied, where Ukrainian forces are advancing, and where the front lines appear vulnerable. It serves as both a survival resource and a news tool, funded by donations and supported by a partnership with the Ministry of Defense to ensure its battlefield insights remain accurate.

Now envision that same map overlaid on a sleek 3D globe named PolyGlobe, featuring icons that represent Polymarket contracts such as “Will Russia capture Huliaipole by December 31?” When users hover over the bet, the specific neighborhood illuminates. The area where someone’s parents reside is the same area where another individual has “Yes” odds calculated to three decimal points.

This narrative exists in a duality: on one side, a wartime public resource, and on the other, a crypto prediction platform that allows real-money bets on seized territories.

In late November, a Ukrainian tech publication reported that Pentagon Pizza Watch, the anonymous team behind PolyGlobe, had incorporated DeepState’s API directly into its war-betting interface without authorization. The article indicated that the map was being integrated into a Polymarket visualization tool, enabling traders to view shaded control zones, unit icons, and attack vectors directly alongside their war bets, creating a “first-of-its-kind OSINT market tracker” built upon another’s wartime infrastructure.

Screengrab of the Polyglobe website displaying an interactive world map with live locations for open bets on Polymarket on Nov. 28, 2025 (Source: Poly.globe)

DeepState UA, the organization responsible for the map, responded within hours. In a public statement shared through local media and social platforms, they asserted that they had never permitted any betting service to connect to DeepStateMap and deemed the use of their work for war gambling unacceptable, suggesting that third parties were likely accessing the data through a free API meant for humanitarian and military purposes or via scrapers.

Pentagon Pizza Watch issued an apology and removed the integration, stating they believed a public endpoint was fair game. Although the incident was relatively brief, it raised a more profound question that extends beyond a single plugin: what occurs to open wartime tools when crypto markets begin to utilize them as raw material for wagers, while both Ukrainian and Russian families mourn their dead from drone strikes and artillery fire?

When the frontline becomes a futures contract

Polymarket has heavily invested in geopolitical and war markets. According to reports from dev.ua, in November, there were approximately 100 active contracts related to the Russia–Ukraine conflict, ranging from whether Russian forces would capture Pokrovsk or Myrnohrad by year’s end to when a ceasefire might finally take hold, with around 97 active war bets and nearly $96.8 million in trading volume. A trader exploring these markets encounters language that resembles a rules appendix more than a discussion about human lives.

In several contracts, Polymarket explicitly cites the Institute for the Study of War’s interactive Ukraine map as the primary resolution source and DeepStateMap.Live as a secondary option if ISW becomes unavailable. If both maps go offline, the fallback plan is to rely on a “consensus of credible reporting.” In essence, the frontline map that millions of Ukrainians utilize to determine if their village is under occupation is embedded in the fine print of an on-chain casino as a type of oracle of record.

Proponents of prediction markets argue that this is the objective. Their claim is that probabilities are crowdsourced from individuals willing to stake money, the markets assimilate all available information, including live OSINT feeds, and the outcome is a clearer forecast of the future than any political analyst can provide. For long-term macro inquiries or election probabilities, that argument aligns with the typical “wisdom of crowds” narrative.

However, war represents a distinct category. A person checking Polymarket to see if a ceasefire has a 5% or 10% price this month is engaging with a financial product. Conversely, someone consulting DeepStateMap to ascertain whether Russian artillery is near their town is attempting to determine if they can safely drive their children to school, just as someone in Kursk or Belgorod is trying to assess whether Ukrainian drones will strike a fuel depot close to their residence.

This conflict has already resulted in tens of thousands of civilian fatalities. Various sources report differing figures, but the consensus indicates that there are over 50,000 documented civilian casualties in Ukraine alone, with likely well over a million soldiers on both sides killed or injured. One side of the market is voluntarily taking risks, while the other is subjected to violence involuntarily. When these two aspects converge into the same set of tools, some of the separation that typically exists between speculation and real-world harm diminishes.

The PolyGlobe integration pushed this logic to its extreme. The dev.ua report quotes the Pentagon Pizza Watch team stating that geographic war markets “constantly confuse people,” and that overlaying DeepState’s map on their globe would clarify that by allowing users to hover over a region and see “the exact area of the transaction where it is being resolved.” No more disputes over whether a station truly qualifies as “captured”; just zoom in and observe the map update in near-real time as troops advance. It’s an appealing user experience for a trader, and a disconcerting one if that shaded area happens to be where someone you know is stationed.

Screengrab of all open Polymarket’s bets on Russia capturing various Ukrainian regions on Nov. 28, 2025 (Source: Polymarket)

To clarify, Polymarket did not develop the PolyGlobe code and never claimed to be scraping DeepState’s API. However, its war markets are situated at the center of a network of tools and plugins that do, and the platform establishes the fundamental incentive structure that renders those tools profitable.

When a third-party dashboard integrates humanitarian OSINT with Polymarket markets, it does so to boost trading volume, attract additional users, and enhance the betting experience for individuals speculating on the capture of Ukrainian towns or the fall of another Russian-held village.

This is not an incidental byproduct of an innocent tool; it is the business model functioning precisely as intended.

When public goods meet private odds

DeepStateMap serves as a high-traffic, high-stakes information resource: by early 2024, the map had surpassed a billion views, with daily traffic in the hundreds of thousands, and its team collaborates with the Ukrainian military to verify frontline information so that civilians and soldiers can accurately see where the fighting is occurring.

While the primary focus is on Ukrainian territory, the same conflict has led to drone and missile strikes in border regions of Russia, Crimea, and the Black Sea, resulting in civilian deaths and injuries there as well; the UN has recorded hundreds of civilian casualties in Western Russia and occupied Crimea linked to this conflict, even without full access to Russian-controlled areas.

It is funded through a combination of donations and government support, and its API is specifically designed for humanitarian applications, journalists, and civil defense. When DeepState UA states that “systematic attempts at unauthorized use” are compelling them to tighten API access, implement individualized keys, and allocate time to intellectual property enforcement, they are not merely addressing the inconvenience of a scrape.

Every hour spent monitoring unauthorized users is an hour not dedicated to enhancing the map, fortifying it against DDoS attacks, or developing improved overlays for air raid patterns and artillery ranges on either side of the border. This situation forces a volunteer-driven team into a gatekeeping role, reviewing requests and revoking keys, rather than treating their data as a communal public resource.

The greater risk here is that, due to excessive misuse, initiatives like DeepState may conclude that open endpoints are more trouble than they are worth. They might restrict the API to closed partnerships, slow down refresh rates, or reduce granularity in the public version. While this may be a rational defensive measure for the team, it presents a very different scenario for an NGO field worker, a local journalist, or a family attempting to make route decisions based on the perceived location of the front.

Polymarket’s own history does not alleviate this tension. Earlier this year, the platform faced a $7 million controversy over a market regarding whether Donald Trump would secure a mineral deal with Ukraine. The contract settled on “Yes” even though no such agreement came to fruition, after a significant holder of UMA governance tokens reportedly utilized their voting power to influence that outcome. If substantial financial stakes can distort a niche geopolitical market concerning a hypothetical Trump deal, it is not difficult to envision similar manipulations surrounding war contracts that depend on subtle changes at the front.

This does not imply that prediction markets lack relevance in conflict analysis. Scholars and policymakers have experimented with war-related contracts for years, often within controlled, low-stakes environments, to assess expectations regarding outcomes such as peace agreements or sanctions.

The Polymarket version of this differs in at least two significant ways: the financial stakes are substantial, with nearly $100 million traded across Russian–Ukrainian war markets in a single month according to Ukrainian media, and the experience has been tailored for retail gamblers. The outcome is a hybrid product that borrows the terminology of “information markets” but feels, to those whose lives are reflected in those price charts, like a sportsbook, albeit with superior branding.

A more fundamental question lurks beneath all of this. Whose consent is significant when transforming a public map of a war into infrastructure for financial wagers? The organization that created it? Ukrainians? Russians?

DeepState UA developed its project to assist Ukrainians in navigating a conflict that has displaced millions and claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives, while Russians are also mourning relatives and friends in a war initiated in their name that now directs Ukrainian drones toward their homes. The team has made it abundantly clear that they do not wish to be part of a betting economy surrounding territorial loss.

Conversely, Polymarket and its associated tools operate within a crypto culture where everything that can be assigned a price will be, and where “degen” is embraced as a badge rather than a derogatory term. For one group of communities, war is a matter of life and death; for another, it is a source of volatility with an RSS feed.

The incident involving PolyGlobe will eventually fade from the news cycle. Pentagon Pizza Watch has already removed the DeepState integration and pledged not to utilize the data without explicit consent. Polymarket’s war markets will continue to operate, with references to ISW and DeepState embedded in the rulebooks, and a new wave of users will keep discovering that they can place bets on the fate of towns they have never heard of.

The pressing question is what is left behind when prediction markets shift from “Who wins the election” to “Who loses their home this quarter,” as Russia continues to launch cruise missiles at Ukrainian apartment buildings and Ukraine persists in sending drones into Russian cities that were once far from any front line.

If humanitarian mapping initiatives determine that betting platforms are parasitic, the likely response will be to retreat: increased friction, more restricted data, fewer open feeds. This may frustrate those engaged in speculative betting, but they will find alternative avenues for gambling. The individuals who cannot navigate around that withdrawal are the civilians who rely on accurate, timely, open intelligence to manage their daily lives in their war-torn communities.

Defenders of war betting will argue that markets merely reflect reality, that odds on a ceasefire or a breakthrough in Donbass are simply numbers. However, those numbers are superimposed over real locations where actual people reside, and every wager placed against that backdrop feels like another small wound to the fragile trust that encourages civilians to share information and volunteers to update maps. The troubling aspect of Polymarket’s war games is the gradual erosion of a digital commons created to assist individuals in surviving a conflict, now compelled to focus on self-protection against those who would turn that conflict into a game.

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