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

Customers trying to farm a possible Polymarket airdrop have upped their operations in an try to 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 the US—possible in 2026.

Final yr, as many customers anticipated {that a} token launch would comply with the U.S. election, farmers purchased and offered giant 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 stated he’d personally report them.

Now, each Fhantom Bets and notable Polymarket consumer CSP Buying and selling instructed Decrypt they imagine farmers could have gotten “extra refined” of their efforts, as that earlier sample has largely 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 instructed Decrypt. “I don’t actually see that for the sports activities markets that I’m market making; that’s the one cause 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 yr, however is for certain that persons 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 stop this from being an outlier statistic. Fhantom Bets is now engaged on a venture to determine these wash merchants.



A pseudonymous dealer often called Shady instructed 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 performed by such a small share of their customers,” Shady instructed Decrypt. “There are some customers and bots that may commerce eight figures in quantity monthly, whereas the typical consumer might be not even doing six figures in quantity. In the event that they rewarded folks linearly primarily based on quantity, it will create a distribution closely skewed in the direction of the highest.”

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

CSP Buying and selling instructed Decrypt he’s tremendous if a consumer like that is rewarded in an airdrop. Fhantom Bets jokingly stated he would hate to see anybody earn money aside from himself and his mates.

Predictors on Myriad now imagine there’s a lower than 15% probability {that a} Polymarket token can be introduced this yr, down from 16.4% per week in the past. Sources instructed Decrypt that even when it have been introduced this yr, it’s possible that the token gained’t be launched till subsequent yr 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.)