Customers making an attempt to farm a possible Polymarket airdrop have upped their operations in an try and make it tougher for the prediction market to exclude them. It follows latest Decrypt reporting that Polymarket plans to launch a crypto token as soon as it has regained a foothold in the USA—doubtless in 2026.
Final 12 months, as many customers anticipated {that a} token launch would comply with the U.S. election, farmers purchased and offered massive positions to artificially inflate their quantity. They did so in an effort to place themselves for a bigger allocation of a future token airdrop, which are sometimes designed to reward a crypto protocol’s most energetic and fervent customers.
This methodology was extraordinarily straightforward to identify and annoying for regular customers, because it clogged the exercise feed—a lot in order that pseudonymous Polymarket whale Fhantom Bets stated he’d personally report them.
Now, each Fhantom Bets and notable Polymarket person CSP Buying and selling informed Decrypt they consider farmers might have gotten “extra subtle” of their efforts, as that earlier sample has principally disappeared.
“Earlier than, it was fairly apparent. They’d do enormous $50,000 block buys towards themselves—that was fairly clearly unsophisticated wash buying and selling,” CSPTrading informed Decrypt. “I don’t actually see that for the sports activities markets that I’m market making; that’s the one cause I believe they’ve gotten ‘extra subtle,’ or given up.”
Fhantom Bets agreed that airdrop farming on Polymarket seems much less rampant than it was final 12 months, however is definite that individuals are nonetheless doing it. Beforehand, he stated, wash merchants have been simply noticed as they typically purchased and offered shares of markets between two accounts.
Now, he speculates, wash merchants are doing so with over 100 wallets to forestall this from being an outlier statistic. Fhantom Bets is now engaged on a undertaking to determine these wash merchants.
A pseudonymous dealer often known as Shady informed Decrypt that they’re farming the airdrop, however their methodology for doing so doesn’t require wash buying and selling. As a substitute, they’ve recognized 4 standards they consider will likely be thought-about for the airdrop: quantity, revenue, offering liquidity, and the variety of markets a person trades.
“I believe [the airdrop] is prone to be tiered or comply with a logarithmic curve, as a ton of the quantity and liquidity rewards are accomplished by such a small share of their customers,” Shady informed Decrypt. “There are some customers and bots that can commerce eight figures in quantity monthly, whereas the typical person might be not even doing six figures in quantity. In the event that they rewarded individuals linearly based mostly on quantity, it might create a distribution closely skewed in the direction of the highest.”
Consequently, Shady has merely used the prediction market in a manner that optimizes his publicity to those potential standards.
CSP Buying and selling informed Decrypt he’s advantageous if a person like that is rewarded in an airdrop. Fhantom Bets jokingly stated he would hate to see anybody earn money aside from himself and his associates.
Predictors on Myriad now consider there’s a lower than 15% likelihood {that a} Polymarket token will likely be introduced this 12 months, down from 16.4% per week in the past. Sources informed Decrypt that even when it have been introduced this 12 months, it’s doubtless that the token gained’t be launched till subsequent 12 months because the platform seems to be to re-enter the U.S. market—after it was successfully banned in 2022.
(Disclosure: Myriad is developed by Decrypt’s dad or mum firm, DASTAN.)
