Analysis: Polymarket does not enforce identity verification or address broader insider trading issues, with a few wallets capturing most of the profits.

Deep Tide TechFlow News, April 30, according to CoinDesk, the non-profit research organization Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) latest report shows that the prediction market platform Polymarket has highly concentrated profits, which may indicate broader insider trading issues than the previous insider bets on the Venezuela raid incident. The study analyzed 435k settled markets with a total trading volume of $54.4 billion from January 2021 to mid-March 2026 and found that markets related to military, defense, and other government decision-making had abnormally high win rates for low-probability bets, with an average success rate of about 14% in political markets, and some military-related contracts exceeding 50%.

Taking the example of the U.S. airstrike on Iran in June 2025, hours before the attack, 19 low-probability bets totaling $164k concentrated on buying “YES” contracts that ultimately paid out, with 8 wallets making a profit of about $1.8 million, including one wallet earning nearly $500k. ACDC recommends that Polymarket should enforce identity verification, set conditional payments for suspicious bets, restrict markets where results are decided by a few people, and reduce overly detailed contract designs.