So there was quite a crazy incident at Polymarket last week. A group of bettors apparently knew the answer before the official question was answered, and they made huge profits from it.

The story started when ZachXBT, who is basically a well-known blockchain detective in the community, found evidence that an Axiom employee was engaging in insider trading. He published his findings on Thursday morning. But the problem was, Polymarket had already created a prediction market about who would be exposed by ZachXBT, and its volume had reached $40 million since Monday.

What’s suspicious is that 12 wallets bet heavily on Axiom just before the announcement, and collectively made more than $1 million in profit. One wallet named predictorxyz bought 477,415 shares at an average price of $0.14, now sitting on a profit of $411,000. That’s basically a 7x return. Another large wallet made $266,000 from a $50,000 bet. So this isn’t random guessing; it’s an unusual concentration of profit.

What makes this even more interesting is that ZachXBT himself said he contacted Axiom for comment and an interview before publishing. So some people in that company must have known the report was coming out. They could have bet themselves or told others.

But here’s an interesting irony. Polymarket is designed to catch insider traders by creating prediction markets about insider trading investigations. However, the mechanism actually rewards the subjects of the investigation, not the investigators.

The accelerator is that Polymarket doesn’t require identity verification because the platform is based outside the country. So tracking who profits from these bets is basically impossible without cooperation from Polymarket itself. Axiom said they are “surprised and disappointed” by the findings and will continue to investigate, but they didn’t answer whether any employees bet on Polymarket.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin still stays above $74,000 along with the global risk appetite. The Bitcoin spot ETF in the US has accumulated over 1928374656574839.25T, indicating strong institutional interest. The overall market situation remains supportive for crypto assets despite the insider trading drama at Polymarket.