Customers making an attempt to farm a possible Polymarket airdrop have upped their operations in an try and make it more durable for the prediction market to exclude them. It follows current Decrypt reporting that Polymarket plans to launch a crypto token as soon as it has regained a foothold in america—possible in 2026.
Final 12 months, as many customers anticipated {that a} token launch would comply with the U.S. election, farmers purchased and bought 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 lively 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 mentioned he’d personally report them.
Now, each Fhantom Bets and notable Polymarket consumer CSP Buying and selling advised Decrypt they imagine farmers might have gotten “extra refined” of their efforts, as that earlier sample has principally disappeared.
“Earlier than, it was fairly apparent. They’d do large $50,000 block buys in opposition to themselves—that was fairly clearly unsophisticated wash buying and selling,” CSPTrading advised Decrypt. “I don’t actually see that for the sports activities markets that I’m market making; that’s the one purpose I feel they’ve gotten ‘extra refined,’ or given up.”
Fhantom Bets agreed that airdrop farming on Polymarket seems much less rampant than it was final 12 months, however is for certain that persons are nonetheless doing it. Beforehand, he mentioned, wash merchants have been simply noticed as they typically purchased and bought shares of markets between two accounts.
Now, he speculates, wash merchants are doing so with over 100 wallets to stop this from being an outlier statistic. Fhantom Bets is now engaged on a mission to establish these wash merchants.
A pseudonymous dealer often called Shady advised Decrypt that they’re farming the airdrop, however their methodology for doing so doesn’t require wash buying and selling. As an alternative, they’ve recognized 4 standards they imagine can be thought-about for the airdrop: quantity, revenue, offering liquidity, and the variety of markets a consumer trades.
“I feel [the airdrop] is more likely to be tiered or comply with a logarithmic curve, as a ton of the quantity and liquidity rewards are finished by such a small proportion of their customers,” Shady advised Decrypt. “There are some customers and bots that may commerce eight figures in quantity per 30 days, whereas the common consumer might be not even doing six figures in quantity. In the event that they rewarded folks linearly based mostly on quantity, it will create a distribution closely skewed in direction of the highest.”
Consequently, Shady has merely used the prediction market in a method that optimizes his publicity to those potential standards.
CSP Buying and selling advised Decrypt he’s tremendous if a consumer like that is rewarded in an airdrop. Fhantom Bets jokingly mentioned he would hate to see anybody make cash apart from himself and his buddies.
Predictors on Myriad now imagine there’s a lower than 15% probability {that a} Polymarket token can be introduced this 12 months, down from 16.4% every week in the past. Sources advised Decrypt that even when it have been introduced this 12 months, it’s possible that the token received’t be launched till subsequent 12 months because the platform seems 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.)
