Venezuela’s presidential election has been in the news due to the irregularities and several fraud allegations. To clarify this critical election outcome, cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiasts from Venezuela and worldwide were using the known Polygon-based prediction market, Polymarket. The officialist candidate Nicolas Maduro claims he won, and so does the opposition leader Edmundo González. The information from these kinds of crypto-markets could add some insights.

The main issue right now is the veracity of the result of this election celebrated on July 28. The country’s National Electoral Council proclaimed Maduro the winner, but they lack information to support this claim. According to international observers like the Carter Center, this election “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian A. Nichols claimed that “Maduro must recognize the actual results of Venezuela’s election” at the Organization of American States meeting regarding the issue.

On the other hand, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado — who was supposed to be the candidate but was politically disqualified by the justice under Maduro’s guide — declared González the elected president. The opposition backs this claim by using the official ballots received after the process and a website to check them. And since there’s a diametral difference between both claims, it is where Polymarkets enters the game.

“Last night, tens of thousands of Venezuelans tuned into Polymarket for a source of accurate, real-time truth about who would win their election,” the Polymarket team posted on X on July 29, a day after the elections. For them, the election context made it “painfully clear” that something like this platform is needed.

“The most important thing to us is truth,” the Polymarket team explained to me in an interview. “People are incredibly conditioned to only believe media that confirms their biases and desired outcomes, and algorithms end up only serving people information they agree with. Polymarket tells people the true odds regardless of what anyone wants to happen”, they detailed.

“Polymarket’s purpose is to give the people of Venezuela accurate information about who will be in power, even if it upsets them or was achieved illegitimately,” they underscored. With this motto, Polymarket intends to portray a more accurate reality and rewards people for “uncover truths about the world,” as they pointed out.

And Venezuelans really were looking into it. At least, this was the experience of the peer-to-peer trading platform El Dorado Chief Executive Officer Guillermo Goncalves, a Venezuelan entrepreneur. “Polymarket served as an intriguing tool for monitoring sentiment during the Venezuelan elections,” he told me in an interview.

“Despite many polls indicating an advantage for Edmundo, traders on Polymarket favored Maduro, taking into account the inherent deficiencies of elections conducted in Venezuela. I believe there’s a significant role for apps like Polymarket in presidential elections, providing a transparent, 24/7 market for people to speculate on election outcomes,” Goncalves argued.

However, the potential of crypto to help those struggling because of uncertainty and democracy decline is beyond information markets, and El Dorado showed that potential from a financial standpoint. As the Venezuelan local currency, the bolivar has high inflation, the USD rates were changing, and the company followed it.

“From El Dorado’s P2P perspective, the last few days have been particularly interesting as we tracked real-time sentiment regarding the USD. Today, El Dorado P2P processes over 10,000 trades a day between USDT Tether and Venezuelan Bolivars, making it one of the best ways to track real-time sentiment. We observed the price of the USD skyrocket as election day approached, but the day after the election, with limited commerce and widespread protests in Venezuela, transaction counts dropped by approximately 50%,” he concluded.

Something similar happened in Polymarket. On election day, despite months favoring Maduro, the odds had a radical turn, placing Edmundo Gonzalez as the winner. It wasn’t an anomaly but a demonstration of the “beauty” of this prediction market.

“Edmundo’s odds did briefly rise to as high as 52%. That’s the beauty of Polymarket — you can see the odds change in real time as opposed to waiting for days or weeks for formal results. The market aggregates all of the live information being released and leaked, and the market interprets what that information means & how it impacts the likelihoods”, they explained.

Both Polymarket and El Dorado are products that showcase how important technology could be amid political turbulence. However, despite the information that this could add, the reality is that there are two different conflicting results, and many Venezuelans are in the streets trying to make their voices heard.