Michael Saylor’s Strategy sells $2.5 million bitcoin. Chaos ensues in a major prediction market over who gets paid

Strategy’s (formerly MicroStrategy) first publicized bitcoin sale has triggered a $15 million resolution dispute on Polymarket.

While the sale was announced in a June 1 filing, the actual disposition occurred in late May. Bettors are now split on whether sales executed between May 26 and May 31 should count for the prediction market’s May 31 deadline, with the contract sitting at 81% Yes and flagged “in review.”

The bet “MicroStrategy sells any Bitcoin by ___?” in Polymarket is built on time-stamp-based contracts, each resolving to ‘Yes’ if Michael Saylor’s Strategy sold any bitcoin by 11:59 p.m. ET on its specified deadline.

Where it gets complicated is that the primary sources for the rules governing bet resolution state that the news will be based on MSTR’s filings and onchain data, with a “consensus of credible reporting” as backup.

Strategy sold those bitcoin between May 26 and May 31, but the 8-K was filed on Monday, June 1.

Now that the sale has occurred, the ‘Yes’ contract holders on May 31 argue that, according to the resolution rules, the bet should settle in their favor. Their argument is that the 8-K’s table states the sale occurred before May 31, as the contract states that ‘Yes’ holders should win if the bitcoin activity is ‘presented as of May 31, 2026, 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time.’

However, the ‘No’ holders counter that no public information existed before the filing dropped on June 1, after the May 31 deadline had passed, despite when the actual sale had taken place.

Meanwhile, the June 30 and December 31 contracts have both been priced to 100% ‘Yes’ since the disclosure, reading 99.9 cents on the ‘Yes’ side and 0.1 cents on ‘No.’ Combined, the three contested timeframes have drawn roughly $24.7 million in volume, with the May 31 market alone at $14.65 million.

While the war over the resolution continues, UMA’s optimistic oracle, the dispute-resolution system Polymarket uses for ambiguous markets, will issue the final call. Usually, these disputes get reviewed over a 2-day period.

Heading into the filing, Polymarket had priced odds of any Strategy bitcoin sale before year-end at 84%, up from 10% earlier in the spring, after CEO Phong Le’s first-quarter earnings call comments treating “disciplined sale of bitcoin” as a capital management tool.

The market is now arguing not over whether the sale happened, but over which day’s calendar it sits on and who gets the big payout.

Read more: Michael Saylor’s Strategy signals potential bitcoin sale to fund dividends obligations