A Polymarket market built around ZachXBT’s pending investigation is now facing its own insider-trading questions. On-chain analysis suggests several wallets bought heavily into the “Axiom” outcome before the report went public, with combined gains topping $1 million.
The setup was unusual from the start. ZachXBT published findings on Thursday morning naming crypto trading platform Axiom as the company whose employees he believed had used non-public information to place profitable trades. Because the investigation had been teased for days, Polymarket listed a contract asking users to bet on which company would be named. The market pulled in roughly $40 million in volume since Monday.
Wallet activity clustered around the winning outcome
The suspicious part is how concentrated the buying became before the reveal. Lookonchain identified 12 wallets that bet heavily on Axiom ahead of publication, producing more than $1 million in combined profit. Polysights, a terminal that tracks suspicious activity on Polymarket’s public ledger, separately flagged 5 wallets that wagered around $50,000 and exited with about $266,000.
CoinDesk’s review of additional on-chain data added more detail. The largest “Yes” holder in the Axiom market, an account called predictorxyz, accumulated 477,415 shares at an average price of $0.14 and is now sitting on roughly $411,000 in profit. The second-largest holder, an anonymous wallet, bought 109,450 shares at $0.33. The position sizes stood out. This was not a market shaped by broad conviction across many traders; a small number of wallets dominated the Axiom side.
Odds shifted late, and the timing drew attention
For most of the week, CoinDesk reported that another platform, Meteora, led the market with odds above 50%. That changed late Wednesday, when Axiom’s odds moved higher and peaked at 46.2%. Buying Axiom in the period between the company’s denial and ZachXBT’s Thursday morning post created the appearance that at least some traders may have known what was coming.
ZachXBT later said on social media that he had contacted Axiom for comment and conducted several interviews before publishing, making a leak “probably inevitable.” That indicates multiple people connected to the reporting process may have known the report was imminent before it appeared. Any of them could have traded directly or passed the information to someone else.
Attribution remains difficult without platform cooperation
Identifying the people behind the wallets is still hard. Polymarket’s offshore platform does not conduct identity checks, so tying addresses to individuals would likely require cooperation from the exchange itself. Axiom said it was “shocked and disappointed” by the findings and would continue to investigate. The company did not answer questions on whether it was aware of any employees trading on the Polymarket contract.