Polymarket’s Suit Saga: Understanding the $170M Drama Around Zelensky’s Outfit
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has eschewed wearing formal suits in favor of military-style attire.
In doing this, Zelensky stresses solidarity with Ukraine's civilians and soldiers and keeps attention on Ukraine's defense on the world stage.
All that said, this symbolic clothing choice has led to a lot of speculation about when Zelensky would next don a suit. And these days where speculation appears, onchain prediction markets on Polymarket usually follow.
As such, someone opened a "Will Zelensky wear a suit before July?" market on Polymarket on May 22nd, 2025, with it running through June 30th. The market has done a whopping +$170 million in trading volume since then, but it's also descended into major controversy over the past week.
The seed for this drama was planted on June 23rd, when Zelensky arrived in London wearing the outfit seen in this article:
Dozens of media outlets promptly hailed this as a suit sighting, including the BBC, PBS, and The New York Times. Accordingly, the betting market on Polymarket initially resolved to Yes, meaning any "Yes" voters there were set to be paid out by the market's "No" voters.
Yet the suit was nontraditional in style, and there was an identical market in May 2025 that resolved to "No" (even though, ironically, Zelensky wore a similar black suit outfit during that market's active window, too).
Toward these ends, the new market's "Yes" resolution was challenged via UMA, Polymarket's oracle protocol that settles disputes via $UMA tokenholder votes. The challengers proposed a new "No" resolution, and then this proposal was counter-challenged.
Now, all eyes are on UMA's voters, as their final decision for this market comes out later today.
As you can imagine with many millions of dollars being on the line, this dispute around the truth of what Zelenksy wore on June 23rd has led to plenty of debate online and outrage from many of the market's "Yes" voters.
Notably, even acclaimed menswear expert Derek Guy chimed into the discourse with a thread on X that traced the history of suits to establish his analysis of whether what Zelensky wore was a suit or not.
His conclusion? The outfit met the strict technical definition of a suit, but its nontraditional elements made it fall short of what most people socially expect from a suit. So it's fair to say it was a suit, but it's also fair to say many people wouldn't recognize it as such, leading to reasonable ambiguity.
If I were writing an article about Zelenskyy's dress, I would call it a suit because it's the shortest, easiest way to describe his outfit without getting into the history of men's tailoring. But I would also recognize this is not what most people recognize as a suit. 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/SNwzLyuGp7
— derek guy (@dieworkwear) July 4, 2025
From here, then, there are a handful of potential paths forward.
Of course, the first two options are that UMA voters can either finalize the suit market's "Yes" outcome or "No" outcome. Their third option would be voting for "Unknown," which would give all participants 50% back of what they originally bet. Lastly, Polymarket could cancel the market and fully refund everyone.
All of these possibilities have their own pros and cons, though the "Unknown" or refund routes would probably lead to the least outrage in defusing the underlying stakes. Yet these paths could also set a bad precedent for controversy, not clarity, resolving markets.
On the flip side, a revised "No" outcome would lead to "Yes" voters blasting Polymarket for letting token-weighted votes override reality, while a "Yes" outcome would lead to lots of "No" voters being enraged over large losses and a lack of perceived consistency from Polymarket.
However the dust settles, this episode reminds us that when it comes to onchain prediction marketplaces, clarity of rules and robustness of governance are just as crucial as the tech that runs under the hood.
In the meantime, the ball is in UMA voters' court. Let's see if we get new precedents or an even bigger controversy after today's final vote.