The Polymarket Competitor Nobody Is Talking About

On June 25, 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stepped out of the backseat of a black sedan…and immediately caused havoc in a $210 million market.

It wasn’t intentional. And it had nothing to do with the actual war. But around the globe, a knife fight broke out among Polymarket bettors.

The backstory…

The Ukrainian President hadn’t worn a classic suit since 2022. That’s because after Russia invaded Ukraine that year, the President pledged to wear only military-style fatigues in solidarity with frontline soldiers.

For years, he stayed true to his word. It became such a topic of discussion that bettors began placing wagers on Zelensky’s outfit. Polymarket, a prediction market protocol, had a market that asked what seemed like a straightforward question: “Will Zelensky wear a suit before July?”

Then on June 25, 2025, the Ukrainian President appeared at the NATO summit in The Hague wearing this.

Source: news.novyny.live

The BBC, New York Post, and even the national Ukraine Instagram described the outfit as a suit. At first glance, it certainly looked like a suit.

But Polymarket settled the market to “no”, implying that Zelensky did not wear a suit that day.

That’s when all hell broke loose…

The Dispute

In the hours that followed, bettors who had taken the “yes” contract disputed the result. To resolve the dispute, Polymarket turned to its “oracle.”

The oracle is a decentralized financial contract platform called Universal Market Access (UMA), an independent entity of Polymarket. UMA token holders then vote on the dispute.

The votes came in. By a large margin, UMA holders decided that Zelensky did not wear a suit.

But here’s the issue…

According to a data platform called Sentora, 95% of UMA tokens are controlled by whales, or large players with lots of capital. That means UMA is not a decentralized solution for prediction market resolution.

What’s worse…

UMA token holders frequently loan tokens to delegates who vote on their behalf… Which concentrates the supply even further.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened either…

Something similar took place in a market called “Trump declassifies UFO files in 2025?”. The market was set to expire at “no”, but a whale manipulated the market to settle at “yes.”

It underscores the flaws in Polymarket’s settlement process.

And that’s what makes what happened on April 30 so interesting. A new project might have a solution.

LLM Resolution

Gensyn first appeared on my radar in 2023 when it closed its $43 million Series A round, led by a16z crypto.

It caught my eye because of its ambition. It’s attempting to build out an open infrastructure layer for AI.

It was a grand—and sort of fuzzy—idea at the time. But with the release of a specific application being built on Gensyn, it became crystal clear what makes this blockchain so interesting.

Delphi is an AI-settled information marketplace. In many ways, it’s similar to Polymarket. It’s a prediction platform where traders or bettors (whichever term you prefer) can put money behind the outcome of real-world events.

Source: docs.delphi.fyi

On the surface, this solution isn’t new. And as we touched on in We’ll See You in Court, Kalshi is valued at $22 billion while Polymarket is raising capital at an $11 billion valuation. These two have a clear lead here. Anybody else looks late to the party.

But Delphi offers something unique.

To settle a market, the creator runs a specific prompt through an LLM pre-selected at market creation.

Source: testnet.delphi.fyi

The verification then puts a receipt on the Gensyn blockchain that acts as a way for anybody to reproduce the settlement and computation on their own machine. That’s one of the unique selling points of Gensyn.

They can then verify the hash of that output with what’s on the chain to ensure nothing has been tampered with.

It’s verifiable settlement using a combination of human-curated markets and AI settlement with a blockchain for verifiability.

This is not only less prone to whale manipulation, but also a more scalable, trustworthy solution.

It’s a novel approach to one of the hottest trends of prediction markets.

The Bigger Picture

Worth noting: Gensyn launched its token on April 30. Readers might recall there was another token that launched on April 30 called MEGA. We covered that in a recent essay, Everybody’s In.

Few digital asset investors know about Gensyn. It’s flying under the radar.

Messari—a crypto market intelligence platform— gives it a “low” ranking on mindshare, which is to say nobody is talking about it online.

And here’s the interesting part…

Gensyn’s last raise was back in December 2025 with a $473 million valuation. And in the days following its token launch, it traded at a fully diluted valuation of less than $370 million.

That’s a steep discount — and Delphi, their first application, hasn’t even launched on mainnet yet.

All this might be interesting from an investment perspective. But the real reason I mention it is because it went live at the same time as MegaETH last week.

This is not a coincidence.

As we discussed in The Bitcoin Regime Change Has Already Started, the market is beginning to heat up. Teams, VCs, and early-stage investors understand that now is the time to start launching tokens into the market.

They see what I see—that liquidity is sure to grow in the coming months.

This is an early indicator for what we’ve been mentioning here at Chain of Thought.

The regime is shifting.

We’re getting ready to make the most of it.

Your Pulse on Crypto,

Ben Lilly
Editor, Chain of Thought

P.S. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was invited to curate markets on Delphi, mentioned above, during the project’s testnet phase. This was not an exclusive invitation. But, in the event of a token drop, I may become the beneficial owner of tokens related to the projects mentioned in this essay.