Polymarket’s Top Earner Made $12 Million in 184,000 Trades Over Six Months

An anonymous account that made $12 million from sports betting on prediction-market platform Polymarket over six months ranked as the platform’s most profitable trader. The account’s average return per bet was less than 2%, but it built those gains through about 184,000 repeated trades. The findings suggest professional traders using algorithms and price analysis are becoming more prominent in prediction markets.

The Financial Times reported on October 29 that an analysis of 170 million bets placed by 1.2 million Polymarket accounts since April found the anonymous account “swisstony” generated the largest profit.

The account took about 184,000 trading positions during the period analyzed. Since June, it placed at least one bet every hour for 26 straight days, a pace that has raised the possibility it used an algorithm.

The core strategy was to trade at favorable prices, pull capital back out and redeploy it. The most capital it had in the market at one time was about $17 million, but its cumulative betting volume reached $657 million.

Chris Park, founder of prediction-market analytics firm MSR Decode, said the main strategy was to buy contracts that were undervalued relative to probabilities set by professional sports-betting firms. In addition to predicting match outcomes, the trader captured price gaps across markets and traded repeatedly.

Another high-volume account, “RN1,” placed buy orders on both sides of outcomes and sought profit opportunities from price gaps. That effectively made it a market maker supplying liquidity to counterparties. Traditional sports-betting companies including DraftKings and Flutter have also said they are using their odds-setting capabilities in prediction-market market-making activity.

The market’s capacity for large trades is another reason professional investors are entering. Traditional sports-betting firms often cap deposits or individual bet sizes, but on Polymarket, some traders have placed more than $1 million on a single game.

Still, market surveillance remains a challenge because of anonymous trading. Polymarket said it blocks sanctioned wallets and monitors transactions with firms including blockchain analytics company Chainalysis.

Swisstony has not bought new contracts over the past two months. Park added that profitable traders may split funds across multiple smaller accounts to avoid exposing their strategies, or move to platforms where trading records are not publicly visible.