Diamond Hands, War Plans

(Timothy Minter – Lawfare) In the predawn hours of Jan. 3, U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. Hours later, Gannon Ken Van Dyke withdrew $409,881 from his Polymarket account, converting a $33,034 marker placed over the preceding week into a 12-fold return. He had repeatedly bet that Maduro would be out of power by Jan. 31. According to a federal indictment unsealed in April 2026, Van Dyke knew why. He was a Special Forces Master Sgt. assigned to U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, involved in planning and executing Operation Absolute Resolve—the very operation he spent the week of Dec. 27, 2025, betting on. His last trades came the evening of Jan. 2. The raid began before dawn the next morning. He is reportedly the first U.S. service member prosecuted for using classified information to trade on a prediction market. “Diamond hands” (💎🙌) —a trader’s shorthand derived from Reddit trading forums for holding a position through volatility in expectation of eventual payoff—captures something important about the alleged conduct. Van Dyke’s conviction was not belief. It was foreknowledge. The case also exposes a broader structural problem. Prediction markets have expanded into geopolitical and national security domains—precisely the domains where relevant information is often classified, compartmented, and unevenly distributed. In those contexts, prediction markets do not merely aggregate public sentiment. They convert private information into publicly observable signals. That creates two related problems. First, trading activity tied to military operations or covert action may generate observable indicators available to any adversary monitoring a public price feed. Second, the legal framework is fragmented. Criminal statutes, commodities regulations, ethics rules, and insider trading doctrines each reach portions of the conduct, but none cleanly fits the problem—a patchwork of overlapping regimes designed for different purposes, none adapted to prediction markets tied to national security events. Van Dyke’s prosecution demonstrates that existing authorities are sufficient to bring charges after the fact. But the prosecution also shows that regulatory gaps remain unique to the national security context. – Diamond Hands, War Plans | Lawfare