What if hackers seize control of a regional power grid?
A confirmed grid-control hijack forcing metro blackouts is the one cyber scenario that justifies a real vol spike, because attribution to a state actor reprices war risk — VIX up, Nasdaq/SOL sold, gold bid. Rhymes with the 2015 Ukraine grid hack, but at US-metro scale. Forward: the market reaction hinges entirely on attribution; a criminal actor is a fade, a nation-state is a sustained risk-off.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
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 risk-off shock. Hackers seize operational control of a major regional utility's grid systems, forcing rolling blackouts across a metro area. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.