Polymarket Airdrop Farmers Have Become ‘More Sophisticated’ as Token Launch Looms

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 latest Decrypt reporting that Polymarket plans to launch a crypto token as soon as it has regained a foothold in america—possible in 2026.

Final yr, 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 energetic and fervent customers.

This technique was extraordinarily simple 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 informed Decrypt they imagine farmers could have gotten “extra subtle” of their efforts, as that earlier sample has largely disappeared.

“Earlier than, it was fairly apparent. They’d do enormous $50,000 block buys in opposition to 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 yr, however is for certain that individuals are nonetheless doing it. Beforehand, he mentioned, wash merchants had been simply noticed as they usually purchased and bought 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 mission to establish these wash merchants.



A pseudonymous dealer generally known as Shady informed Decrypt that they’re farming the airdrop, however their technique for doing so doesn’t require wash buying and selling. As an alternative, they’ve recognized 4 standards they imagine will likely be thought-about for the airdrop: quantity, revenue, offering liquidity, and the variety of markets a consumer 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 achieved by such a small share of their customers,” Shady informed Decrypt. “There are some customers and bots that may commerce eight figures in quantity per thirty days, whereas the typical consumer might be not even doing six figures in quantity. In the event that they rewarded folks linearly based mostly on quantity, it might create a distribution closely skewed in the direction of the highest.”

In consequence, Shady has merely used the prediction market in a means that optimizes his publicity to those potential standards.

CSP Buying and selling informed Decrypt he’s fantastic if a consumer like that is rewarded in an airdrop. Fhantom Bets jokingly mentioned he would hate to see anybody earn cash apart from himself and his mates.

Predictors on Myriad now imagine there’s a lower than 15% probability {that a} Polymarket token will likely be introduced this yr, down from 16.4% every week in the past. Sources informed Decrypt that even when it had been introduced this yr, it’s possible that the token received’t be launched till subsequent yr because the platform appears to re-enter the U.S. market—after it was successfully banned in 2022.

(Disclosure: Myriad is developed by Decrypt’s mother or father firm, DASTAN.)