Brent ran from $72/bbl on Feb 27 to $118/bbl on Mar 31 — a 63% move driven by US/Israeli strikes on Iran, Iran's declaration of Hormuz closed, and a sequence of partial reopenings, blockades, and naval clashes through May. Across the same 83 days, $190M traded across 221 Polymarket markets pricing the same crisis in binary form. Read together, the two markets re-rated through every catalyst — escalation, ceasefire, reopening, and rebound — measuring the same underlying question with two completely different instruments.
We compared how Polymarket and the Brent crude futures market priced the same underlying question — is the Strait of Hormuz a working oil chokepoint? — across 83 days. Same event, two structurally different instruments:
From the 221 Hormuz-related markets we anchored on two — the highest-notional question for each phase of the crisis.
We combined them into a single continuous "Hormuz disruption probability" series: closure probability through Mar 14, then 1 − reopen probability from Mar 31 onward. Both readings answer the same underlying question — is Hormuz failing as a working chokepoint? — so higher always means more disruption priced in. Joined to Brent daily closes on a unified time grid.
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The two instruments aren't measuring exactly the same quantity. Polymarket prices discrete events ("does Hormuz close/reopen by date X"); Brent prices a continuous supply-demand balance affected by closure probability, duration, severity, and the OPEC/SPR response. The relationship is non-linear and regime-dependent — a 10pp move in disruption probability doesn't translate to a fixed $/bbl move.
A few methodological choices are worth surfacing: the disruption series concatenates two distinct markets with a 16-day gap (Mar 15–30) when the closure market had resolved and the reopening market hadn't activated yet, so the combination is a useful narrative device rather than a clean apples-to-apples probability; daily resolution captures directional agreement but not intraday lead-lag (Brent's biggest single-session move was –13.3% on Apr 8, Polymarket's was +49pp on Feb 28, and we'd need hourly futures for a clean event study); we anchored on two markets rather than aggregating across the full strike ladder into a weighted "Hormuz risk index" (a methodologically heavier piece worth doing as a follow-up); we used Brent rather than WTI since Brent is the right benchmark for a Middle Eastern supply shock (WTI's spread widening during the crisis is its own story); and notional figures are two-sided USDC trading flow, so Polymarket's own figures using notional shares or taker-side USDC will differ.
This analysis required daily volume-weighted Polymarket probabilities for the two highest-notional Hormuz markets, joined to a daily Brent futures close series on a unified time grid. The unified Dune schema makes this a single query; without it, the same comparison requires pulling per-market token prices from a Polygon subgraph, reconstructing probabilities from raw trades, and stitching to a separate commodity-futures feed.
The same methodology extends to other geopolitical chokepoints (Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Taiwan Strait — any binary "will X happen by date Y?" market with a meaningful tradfi reference price can be reduced to the same chart), cross-market geopolitical signal layers (combining a probability-weighted Polymarket index across many event markets with a basket of affected commodities like Brent, gold, and FX to produce a unified geopolitical risk gauge), and event-driven research more broadly (any discrete-outcome news event priced on a prediction market plus a continuous traditional instrument can be studied with the same workflow).
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