cryptopolitan.com
Polymarket has been accused of insider trading after a trader won around $400,000 in profits on a suspiciously timed bet.
A viral blockchain investigation claiming to link a Polymarket trader to the World Liberty Finance co-founder Steven Charles Witkoff has been thoroughly challenged by the blockchain analytics firm BubbleMaps.
The persistent rumors and potential for future distrust of real-world outcomes with such markets have led Rep. Ritchie Torres to declare his intent to introduce a bill called the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026 this week.
Are Polymarket insider trading rumors true?
A trader on Polymarket placed approximately $32,000 in bets just hours before Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s capture was announced and won around $400,000 in profits. The timing of the bet immediately sparked insider trading accusations across crypto communities.
An independent investigator with the X account andrey_10gwei traced the wallet’s funding sources on-chain. His analysis identified two wallets funding the Polymarket account, with both wallets receiving deposits from the Coinbase exchange.
A 252.39 SOL withdrawal was made from Coinbase to one of these wallets on January 1. Tracing backwards, Andrew found a deposit of 252.91 SOL into Coinbase approximately 23 hours earlier from a wallet with the Solana Name Service domains “STVLU.SOL” and “StCharles.SOL.”
Through the transaction history, he claimed to connect this wallet to another address with the domain “StevenCharles.sol,” which Andrew suggested could refer to Steven Charles Witkoff, co-founder of World Liberty Finance, the Trump-affiliated cryptocurrency project.
The analysis goes on to reveal that after the $440,000 in winnings were withdrawn to Coinbase, approximately $170,000 worth of Fartcoin tokens appeared in the STVLU.sol wallet 14 hours later.
Andrew presented this as evidence of a potential connection, calling it a “99% match” and questioning whether these were “just coincidences” or evidence of insider trading.
What problems did BubbleMaps find in Andrew’s analysis?
BubbleMaps challenged Andrew’s “99% match” claim as pure clickbait. The blockchain analytics firm dismissed the one-day gap between funds entering and leaving an exchange as not particularly earth-shattering news, given the volume of transactions occurring on a centralized exchange of Coinbase’s status daily.
BubbleMaps revealed that the original analysis only considered SOL inflows when searching for matches. When they expanded the search to include other assets like USDC and ETH using the same one-day window and similar dollar values, they found at least 20 different wallets that fit the pattern.
BubbleMaps also pointed out that deposits to Coinbase could originate from bank transfers, multiple smaller deposits aggregated over time, or funds deposited months or years earlier.
The suspicion of insider trading on prediction markets became popular during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, when large bets on Polymarket moved odds significantly.
Since this weekend’s events, a new bill is already underway to prevent federal elected officials, political appointees, and Executive Branch employees from making trades on outcomes of bets that they have nonpublic information on or might be able to get information on through their official duties.
Punchbowl News reported that Rep. Ritchie Torres plans to introduce the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026 this week.
BubbleMaps warned that “timing analysis is powerful, but when used poorly it can lead to almost any conclusion,” reminding the community that correlation does not equal causation.