Polymarket, an online betting marketplace that bills itself as the future of news, can’t decide whether or not Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy wore a suit during a recent appearance in Europe. The gambling site is set to make a final judgement about the question in a few hours and more than $160 million in crypto is riding on it.
Polymarket is a gambling website where users predict the outcome of binary events. It gained prominence in the runup to the 2024 election, signed an exclusivity deal with X in June, and sees itself not just as an online betting parlor, but as an arbiter of truth. Its founder, Shayne Coplan, thinks that the future of media belongs to a website made for degenerate gamblers to make silly bets.
And yet this arbiter of truth had trouble figuring out if Zelenskyy wore a suit at the end of June during a NATO summit. The bet, started on May 22, is simple: “Will Zelenskyy wear a suit before July?” The answer, it turns out, is pretty hard. When Zelenskyy showed up at a NATO summit wearing a tailored jacket and a button up shirt, a stark contrast to his more casual military style garb, a community-run Polymarket account posted, “President Zelenskyy in a suit last night.”
President Zelenskyy in a suit last night pic.twitter.com/Uo3Rhuzkq1
— Polymarket Intel (@PolymarketIntel) June 25, 2025
But people who bet “no” cried foul, complaining that he wasn’t actually wearing a suit on social media and in Polymarket hosted chat rooms. Zelenskyy’s “suit” was an all black get-up with no tie and four cargo-style pockets, some pointed out. The jacket was suit shaped, but it didn’t quite fit everyone’s definition of formal dress. And, perhaps most telling on the side of “not an actual suit,” he was wearing tennis shoes.
According to the “rules” underneath the bet, the market would resolve as a “yes” if the Ukrainian president is photographed or videotaped wearing a suit. “The resolution will be the consensus of credible reporting.”
All the credible reporting around the scene described Zelenskyy’s outfit as a suit. He’s known for wearing military style outfits so the sudden formal outfit generated a lot of headlines. Reuters said the outfit was “suit-style,” a Fox News pundit joked that Trump won’t recognize Zelenskyy because he’s wearing a suit, and the NY Post said that he ditched a “T-shirt for a suit.” There were many more media outlets that noted the fashion upgrade.
Menswear expert and prolific fashion poster Derek Guy told 404 Media that the bet’s stated rules and the media reports were enough for him to declare “yes” the winner, but he also understood that a lot of people wouldn’t consider Zelenskyy’s outfit a suit. “The company that designed his clothes did so intentionally to create a garment that is technically a suit […] but contains militaristic details as a symbolic gesture to war in Ukraine,” he said. “So it is riding this line where it’s not fully meeting the social expectation but it is meeting the technical definition.”
Guy said the line between what people think of as a suit and Zelenskyy’s outfit is thin. “There are a lot of things missing,” Guy said. “The shape of Zelenskyy’s lapel takes inspiration from work jackets and military jackets. He would need the traditional suit jacket lapel […] the other thing is the pocket designs.”He said that a tailored suit typically has three pockets: two hip pockets and an out breast pocket. “In Zelenskyy’s design he has four pockets, not three, and the design borrows from technical outerwear, military clothing, and work wear.”
So. Is it a suit or isn’t it? “It’s a weird suit. But it’s a suit,” Guy said. What was more interesting to him was the controversy around the suit. People have been obsessed with Zelenskyy’s outfits for a long time.
“There’s this idea of respectability connected to the suit. I want to stress it’s not something I support or believe in,” Guy said. He reminded me that Zelenskyy promised he wouldn’t wear a suit again until Russia’s war in Ukraine was over. The military style dress is a constant reminder to the world that his country is at war.
“And he’s stuck with it. This declaration has caused him some problems, caused him some grief in that people are constantly talking about the respectability of dress, often American politicians […] because there’s these two clashing ideas, it’s natural for Polymarket to make a bet on it,” Guy added.
And again, based on the rules laid out by Polymarket, Guy thinks the “yes” votes should win.
At first, the betting market agreed with him. It resolved the bet as a “yes,” but the site’s “no” holders flagged the issue for a disputed resolution. Polymarket kicked the question to a third party, which considered the issue and changed the outcome to a “no.”
Every bet on Polymarket is resolved through a blockchain based third party system called UMA. People who hold UMA tokens, called "oracles," vote on the outcome of an event and can open up disputes about said outcomes. In this system, the question of how to resolve a disputed market gets thrown to "oracles" who are, in theory, impartial. Holding a UMA token buys you a voice in the debate, which plays out in Discord servers and can be watched by the public.
On social media and in Discord, people are accusing UMA token holders of placing side bets on the suit question and attempting to manipulate the market so one side wins. The Discord conversation is full of people claiming UMA has failed and that Polymarket’s administrators are manipulating it directly.
“At the time of this clarification, 09:33am ET July 01, a consensus of credible reporting has not confirmed that Zelenskyy has worn a suit,” Polymarket administrators wrote below the bet. It did not elaborate on what amounted to a “consensus of credible reporting” and it didn’t return 404 Media’s request for a comment on the issue.
Unhappy “yes” betters disputed this resolution and it’s still in review at the time of publication. According to a timer on the bet, Polymarket will issue a final answer to the question by the end of the day.
Update: this piece has been updated to include comment from Derek Guy.
