Crypto-native prediction platform Polymarket and CFTC-regulated venue Kalshi now host some of the hottest real-money markets in the U.S. as traders bet on which public figures appear in newly released Jeffrey Epstein files. Activity tracks a fresh Justice Department document dump under the new Epstein Files Transparency Act together with a multi-year unsealing push in the Giuffre v. Maxwell civil case.
The Justice Department released roughly 30,000 additional pages on December 23, including new emails, photos and tip-line reports, after Congress forced disclosure of Epstein-related materials, according to Reuters. A separate December 19 tranche already filled the department’s online library with heavily redacted records that named global celebrities but left many pages entirely black, Reuters reported in a prior note on the rollout of the law and its political fallout.*
Those federal disclosures land alongside an older but still active civil pipeline. Senior Judge Loretta Preska ordered large portions of the Giuffre v. Maxwell record unsealed in December 2023, with unsealing continuing through early 2024 and further orders this year that balance public access with protection for pseudonymous “Does,” as reflected in docket entries hosted by Justia.*
Polymarket turns name speculation into a ladder of odds
On Polymarket, the multi-market contract titled “Who will be named in newly released Epstein files?” has grown into a seven-figure trade. A live market page that centers the Ehud Barak contract shows about $1.57 million in aggregate volume for the bundle, with trading scheduled to run through December 31, 2025.*
Polymarket’s rule set requires that the Trump Administration or a federal court release previously unreleased Epstein files between July 16 and December 31, 2025. The files must contain novel material, not just unredacted or repackaged versions of earlier records, and credible media coverage must confirm that the documents mention the specific individual, according to the market description on the platform.*
Pricing across the bundle reads like a real-time scoreboard on reputational risk. As of this week, the Barak line trades around 56.7¢ for “Yes,” while contracts on Elon Musk change hands near 27.1¢, Al Gore at 27.5¢, and Tony Blair around 22¢.* Barack Obama’s market sits closer to 13¢, with Stephen Hawking and Joe Biden each near 12¢, according to the same Polymarket dashboard. A mirror event page on polyme.market tracks 40 such submarkets, spanning political leaders, financiers and media figures.
Despite the frenzy, broader crypto prices barely react. Polygon’s rebranded POL token, which underpins much of the infrastructure that Polymarket uses, trades near $0.1067 today, down about 0.5% on the session.***
Kalshi drags the same trade into the U.S. regulatory perimeter
Kalshi runs a parallel series of contracts with a slightly different framing. Instead of a multi-name ladder under one umbrella, Kalshi lists separate markets that ask whether a specific individual will be named in any Epstein-related document held by the federal government and released before January 1, 2026, with settlement based on a binary “Yes” or “No” outcome, according to event descriptions summarized by QuiverQuant.*
In mid November, QuiverQuant data showed Kalshi’s Barack Obama contract implying a 72% chance that federal Epstein files would name him in any context, with roughly 249,877 trades to date and about 2.94 million contracts of liquidity across the order book.* A separate Bill Clinton market implied a 99% probability in late August, while contracts on Joe Biden and Michael Jackson recently priced around 35% and 77% respectively, with tens of thousands of open positions in each line.***
Earlier this year, Bitcoin.com flagged the same “who gets named” contracts on both platforms as new Epstein records started to move into public view, framing them as high-stakes wagers on reputations rather than on macro data or election outcomes.
Markets front-run disclosures while the law wrestles with redactions
The legal machinery that feeds these markets still moves cautiously. A Washington Post report on December 9 described how a federal judge ordered the release of hundreds of thousands of Maxwell-related records under the transparency law, while requiring U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to strip out victim identifiers before publication.* Earlier unsealing orders in Giuffre v. Maxwell show how Preska weighed similar concerns as she approved disclosure of some “Doe” identities and kept others under seal.
In one January 2024 order, Preska warned that “there is therefore no way to claw back information once it has been revealed,” stressing the real-world damage from mistaken disclosures.
The federal releases themselves now add fuel for speculation. Reuters notes that the latest 30,000-page batch includes emails about Trump’s past flights on Epstein’s jet, extensive redactions and several items the department later labeled false or unreliable, such as a purported Epstein video and a handwritten card that mentioned Trump but failed basic authenticity checks.* Earlier coverage of the January 2024 civil releases already stressed that presence in court papers does not equate to criminal conduct, a point repeated by outlets such as Al Jazeera when they listed names ranging from Bill Clinton to Prince Andrew and Michael Jackson in those files.*
Prediction markets ignore that nuance by design. They pay out on any mention that meets the rule set, not on the weight of the allegation. The Epstein files saga now shows how quickly crypto-native venues can wrap a politically loaded document dump in tradable odds, while courts and lawmakers still argue over what should leave the redaction layer.
