French Polymarket whale estimated to make $79 million on US election bets amid reports of France looking to ban the platform

2024-11-09 18:36:56 Primitive Reading

From theblock by James Hunt

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis estimates the pseudonymous Polymarket whale named “Théo,” also known as “Fredi9999,” has made a net profit of $78.7 million on U.S. election bets. These included wagers on Donald Trump to win the presidency, the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and the popular vote — an outcome many saw as unlikely.

Théo came to prominence earlier in the election campaign amid allegations of manipulation related to a single entity managing multiple accounts on the decentralized predictions platform, seeking to skew the odds in Trump’s favor.

Polymarket's own investigation in October claimed there was no evidence of market manipulation following large U.S. election whale bets, supporting the view that prediction markets simply reflect all available information at a given moment, according to analysts at trading and financial services firm Presto. The platform’s U.S. presidential market generated nearly $3.7 billion in trading volume during the campaign.

At the time, Polymarket revealed that a whale behind four large accounts who spent more than $45 million on Polymarket bets for Trump to win the U.S. presidential election was a French national with extensive trading experience and a financial services background.

However, fresh data from Chainalysis late Wednesday suggests the whale appeared to control a total of nine Polymarket accounts based on their funding patterns, timing of transactions and cash outs to specific crypto exchange deposit addresses.

“Based on Polymarket’s calculations, these addresses appear to have earned a net profit of nearly $79 million betting primarily on a Trump victory,” Chainalysis said — larger than previously reported estimates following the market's resolution.

French whale's Polymarket net profits. Image: Chainalysis.

Polls should have measured the ‘neighbor effect’

According to a Wall Street Journal report on Wednesday, Théo took a different approach to analyzing voting intentions. Picking up on alternative polls asking people, “who are your neighbors voting for?” rather than “who are you voting for?” the trader noticed they had Trump overperforming. This prompted the French national to commission their own poll to confirm the data in a bet against the accuracy of traditional polling methods.

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