Trader earns $ 1 million on Polymarket thanks to accurate bets on Iran

Analysts have identified suspicious activity on the Polymarket platform: one trader in 2024 earned almost $ 1 million on bets that accurately predicted military strikes by the United States and Israel against Iran. According to Bubblemaps, the user won 93% of large transactions, and some bets were placed just a few hours before the start of operations.

Experts consider this success to be a sign of possible insider use of information. Typically, high-frequency traders have a winning rate of just over 50%, while in this case it exceeded 80% overall and 93% for trades over $ 10,000.

Polymarket operates outside of the US jurisdiction, which makes regulatory control difficult. At the same time, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) last year approved the launch of a separate version of the platform for US users and reminded them that insider trading is illegal.

Against the backdrop of the war in Iran and other geopolitical crises, such cases attract the attention of lawmakers. The US is already discussing new legislation that would prohibit federal officials from using non-public information to place bets on predictive markets.

Experts emphasize that although it is difficult to prove insider activity in such cases, the extremely high success rates of bets look «too good to be true» and reinforce calls for stricter regulation of forecasting platforms.