A tiny group is winning on Polymarket as under 1% of wallets take half the profits
After research showed a small minority moves prices, new data suggests an even smaller group captures roughly half of all gains
By Sam Reynolds|Edited by Jamie Crawley Apr 29, 2026, 12:00 p.m. Make preferred on
What to know:
- A new Solidus Labs analysis finds that fewer than 1 percent of Polymarket wallets captured about half of all profits in key political prediction markets between December 2025 and February 2026.
- The report suggests a structural divide in prediction markets, with a tiny cohort of well-capitalized, technologically advanced traders consistently out-earning the broader user base.
- Solidus also flags signs of wash trading and possible $POLY airdrop farming on Polymarket, even as it uses the on-chain data to promote its own market-surveillance platform.
A small group of traders may be driving prediction markets, but an even smaller group is taking most of the money.
A new report from blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs finds that profit concentration on Polymarket is extreme, with fewer than 1% of wallets capturing roughly half of all gains in key markets.
Across Polymarket’s politics markets between December 2025 and February 2026, just 0.55% of profitable maker wallets captured 50% of gains, the report finds, while 0.26% of winning taker wallets accounted for nearly the same share. In dollar terms, roughly $8 million of about $16 million in profits accrued to each of those tiny cohorts.
The data sharpens a picture already forming in academic work: a London Business School and Yale paper, previously analyzed by CoinDesk, found that about 3% of Polymarket traders drive most price discovery.
A small minority moves the prices. A smaller minority keeps the money.
The contrast underscores a key point: concentration does not necessarily imply wrongdoing. Some traders are simply more sophisticated, better capitalized, or faster to act on information. But the report argues that the scale of the imbalance suggests a structural divide between a small group operating with significant advantages and the broader base of participants.
“The participants capturing a disproportionate share of profits are operating in a different league entirely,” the report said, pointing to capital depth, infrastructure, and execution strategies that are out of reach for most users.
Solidus' study also flags signs of wash trading, with roughly 15% of volume in some markets showing patterns consistent with self-trading or economically neutral positions.
Because outcome tokens in a binary prediction market sum to roughly $1.00, a trader could buy YES on both Trump and Harris inside the same time window, register volume on each leg, and finish economically delta-neutral.
Solidus says this trade has no equivalent in traditional finance.
Some of that volume may be incentive farming rather than pure manipulation. It's widely speculated that Polymarket's upcoming $POLY airdrop will factor in trading volume as a metric to allocate tokens.
Market surveillance sales pitch
Solidus is not a neutral observer. The firm sells HALO, the surveillance platform whose output the report relies on, and recently signed a deal to deploy that platform across more than 4,000 markets on Kalshi, Polymarket's largest U.S.-regulated competitor.
The data is onchain and verifiable. The framing — that prediction markets need surveillance infrastructure, preferably Solidus's — is part of the pitch.
That doesn't change the underlying numbers. It does suggest reading them with a hand on the wallet.
If earlier research showed that a small minority moves these markets, the latest data point to something sharper.
If earlier research showed that a small minority moves these markets, the latest data suggests an even starker conclusion: an even smaller group consistently wins them.
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