Polymarket trader 0xA2 tops daily leaderboard with $917K on midterm bets
In brief
- 0xA2 topped Polymarket's daily leaderboard with $917,000 in profit, Decrypt reported.
- A $609,644 bet against Republican Senate swing-state wins grew to $1.48 million.
- Alaska's pending result leaves most gains unrealized; Polymarket traders priced a 14% upset chance.
- Midterm markets drew more than $546 million in notional volume over two weeks, per Prediction.com.
A swing-state bet at 36%
Most of the haul came from one wager. 0xA2 bet $609,644 that Republicans wouldn't win any Senate swing states when that market sat at 36%. It later climbed to 87%.
That stake grew to $1.48 million, putting the trader $860,000 ahead on the position (per Decrypt's figures). It isn't locked in, though. The gains are unrealized and could drop while 0xA2 waits on Alaska's final verdict, and Polymarket traders were pricing a 14% chance of an upset.
Fourteen percent isn't zero.
0xA2 did bank one win outright, a realized profit of $106,115 from betting that Democrats would win the Texas Senate race. The account's second-largest open position is something else entirely ($1.42 million on the U.S. not confirming that aliens exist before 2027).
A bigger night than usual
The top of the board was crowded. Polymarket's top 10 users each profited more than $170,000, according to the leaderboard. On one day in March, by comparison, the platform's top daily winner made $154,000 and the 10th-biggest made $29,700, according to the WayBackMachine.
Kelly Ye, Head of Research at digital asset management firm Talos, said in a note shared with Decrypt that odds moved fast once results came in.
"Election night showed how quickly round-the-clock markets move when traditional exchanges are closed. As polls began closing at 6pm ET, Kalshi’s odds of a Democratic sweep went from about 74% to 99%,"
Ye said prediction-market trading peaked between 8pm and 10pm ET and was led by a small number of large trades. Midterm markets drew more than $546 million in notional volume over two weeks, according to Prediction.com data. Dash, Prediction.com's pseudonymous data lead, said sports dominate volume but politics is still the key driver of open interest.
The 2024 benchmark and a miss in Brazil
During the 2024 presidential race, Bernstein analysts called Polymarket the world's largest election prediction market, and its flagship market topped $3.6 billion in volume. Traders there favored Trump for most of the campaign while traditional polls had him neck and neck with Kamala Harris.
Brazil was a miss. Two weeks earlier, Polymarket traders gave Lula da Silva about a 20% chance, and he went on to beat Flávio Bolsonaro for a fourth term. Experts told Decrypt that Brazil's ban on prediction markets left the odds to traders with little local knowledge.
