Polymarket Election Betting Rife With Wash Trading: Report

Polymarket’s odds as an election indicator have been questioned in a new report despite its widespread citation in mainstream media.

On Oct. 30, Fortune reported that analysts at two crypto research firms had found evidence of “rampant wash trading” on the blockchain betting platform.

The findings come from separate investigations completed by Chaos Labs and Inca Digital.

Spurious Betting Activity?

Wash trading is a form of market manipulation where assets are repeatedly bought and sold within a short period to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs researchers claimed that wash trading constituted around one-third of Polymarket’s election trading volume, while Inca Digital said it was a “significant portion of the volume.”

The actual transaction volume of $1.75 billion doesn’t match the reported volume of $2.7 billion, the research claimed. Additionally, the platform appears to be counting share prices as full dollars regardless of the actual cost, it added.

Chaos Labs analyzed on-chain data to isolate high-volume traders. It filtered out users that were “likely engaged” in normal activities like market making, the report noted. The firm then separated those who exhibited signs of wash trading by “examining their ratio of buy and sell orders and taking account of their shareholdings compared with their trading volume.”

A Polymarket spokesperson told Fortune, “We strive to provide users with the fairest analysis possible, and our transparency allows the market to decide.”

Polymarket is the largest blockchain betting platform, founded in 2020 and backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. It was forced to move offshore following US regulatory action in 2022 and is not accessible to Americans.

In September, it was reported that Polymarket was seeking $50 million in new funding and had plans to launch its own token. It was also reported that US election hype drove the platform’s trading volume to $533 million in September.

Trump Has Big Lead on Polymarket

The latest election poll betting results on the platform show Donald Trump with a 66% lead over Kamala Harris with 34%.

Latest Election Odds

Trump • 66.1% chance
Harris • 33.9% chance

5 days to go. pic.twitter.com/aybIfAMqT7

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) October 30, 2024

AtlasIntel polls, the most accurate pollster of the 2020 election, according to Florida Voice assistant news director Eric Daugherty, has Trump leading Harris by 55% to 45%.

However, the FiveThirtyEight poll has Harris with a slim lead of 48.1% and Trump with 46.7%. Meanwhile, the YouGov poll has Harris at 50% to win the popular vote and Trump at 47%.