Polymarket Bets Spark Insider Trading Concerns

• Axiom mentioned it was “shocked as well as disappointed” by the findings and would carry on to investigate.
• It did not reply to questions regarding whether it was aware of any employees trading on the Polymarket wager. 

ZachXBT, a blockchain sleuth, published its report on February 26, in which Axiom is a firm whose employees he believed had used non-public information to position profitable trades. The scrutiny had been teased for days, and Polymarket had made a contract permitting users to bet on which firm would be named, captivating around $40 million in volume since February 23. 

The issue is that someone knew the answer before it slipped. Lookonchain recognised 12 wallets that bet deliberately on Axion before the unveil, earning a net profit of more than $1 million. 

Another analysis by Polysights, a data terminal that traces suspicious activity on the public ledger of Polymarket, identified five wallets that altogether bet around $50,000 and went away with $266,000. 

The biggest Yes holder on the Axiom market, an account known as predictorxyz, gathered 477,415 shares at an average price of $0.14 and now stands at $411,000 in profit. That’s around a 7x return on a bet positioned before the answer became public. 

The disappointment of Axiom

The second-biggest holder, an anonymous wallet, purchased 109,450 shares at $0.33, and the correction is significant. This was not a wide market full of informed guesses. ZachXB accepted that he had contacted Axiom for comment and did various interviews before publishing, making a leak “mostly inevitable”.

This says various people at the company already knew the report was coming before it actually went live. Any of them could have placed bets directly or tipped someone who did. The offshore platform of Polymarket does not have identity checks, making marking attribution difficult without cooperation from the exchange itself. 

Axiom mentioned it was “shocked as well as disappointed” by the findings and would carry on to investigate. It did not reply to questions regarding whether it was aware of any employees trading on the Polymarket wager. The structural irony here is that the mechanism worked exactly as designed. 

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