What if Congo slashes its cobalt export quota toward zero?
A DRC cobalt-quota cut toward zero starves battery cathodes of a key input, but the real price action is in the cobalt/battery-metals complex and EV-cell makers, not broad Nasdaq semis. Rhymes with the 2018 cobalt squeeze and Indonesia's 2020 nickel ore ban, both of which spiked the specific metal hard. China controls DRC offtake and refining; it is both the chokepoint and the buyer, so it can partly self-supply. Forward angle: the mapped semiconductor/Nasdaq drag is mis-specified — this is an industrial-metal/EV story with limited tech-index spillover.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. DRC cuts its 2026 cobalt export quota toward zero, starving the lithium-ion battery supply chain of a key input. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.