Users attempting to farm a potential Polymarket airdrop have upped their operations in an attempt to make it harder for the prediction market to exclude them. It follows recent Decrypt reporting that Polymarket plans to release a crypto token once it has regained a foothold in the United States—likely in 2026.
Last year, as many users anticipated that a token launch would follow the U.S. election, farmers bought and sold large positions to artificially inflate their volume. They did so in an effort to position themselves for a larger allocation of a future token airdrop, which are often designed to reward a crypto protocol’s most active and fervent users.
This method was extremely easy to spot and annoying for normal users, as it clogged the activity feed—so much so that pseudonymous Polymarket whale Fhantom Bets said he’d personally report them.
Now, both Fhantom Bets and notable Polymarket user CSP Trading told Decrypt they believe farmers may have gotten “more sophisticated” in their efforts, as that previous pattern has mostly disappeared.
“Before, it was pretty obvious. They’d do huge $50,000 block buys against themselves—that was pretty obviously unsophisticated wash trading,” CSPTrading told Decrypt. “I don’t really see that for the sports markets that I’m market making; that’s the only reason I think they’ve gotten ‘more sophisticated,’ or given up.”
Fhantom Bets agreed that airdrop farming on Polymarket appears less rampant than it was last year, but is certain that people are still doing it. Previously, he said, wash traders were easily spotted as they often bought and sold shares of markets between two accounts.
Now, he speculates, wash traders are doing so with over 100 wallets to prevent this from being an outlier statistic. Fhantom Bets is now working on a project to identify these wash traders.
A pseudonymous trader known as Shady told Decrypt that they are farming the airdrop, but their method for doing so doesn’t require wash trading. Instead, they’ve identified four criteria they believe will be considered for the airdrop: volume, profit, providing liquidity, and the number of markets a user trades.
“I think [the airdrop] is likely to be tiered or follow a logarithmic curve, as a ton of the volume and liquidity rewards are done by such a small percentage of their users,” Shady told Decrypt. “There are some users and bots that will trade eight figures in volume per month, while the average user is probably not even doing six figures in volume. If they rewarded people linearly based on volume, it would create a distribution heavily skewed towards the top.”
As a result, Shady has simply used the prediction market in a way that optimizes his exposure to these potential criteria.
CSP Trading told Decrypt he is fine if a user like this is rewarded in an airdrop. Fhantom Bets jokingly said he would hate to see anyone make money other than himself and his friends.
Predictors on Myriad now believe there is a less than 15% chance that a Polymarket token will be announced this year, down from 16.4% a week ago. Sources told Decrypt that even if it were announced this year, it’s likely that the token won’t be launched until next year as the platform looks to re-enter the U.S. market—after it was effectively banned in 2022.
(Disclosure: Myriad is developed by Decrypt’s parent company, DASTAN.)
