Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he made about $70,000 on Polymarket in 2025 after deploying roughly $440,000 in capital. His approach, as described in an interview, was straightforward: find markets that have entered what he called a “crazy mode” and bet that the extreme outcome being priced in will not actually happen.
A strategy built on fading emotional pricing
Buterin framed the edge as a gap between real probability and crowd psychology. In the interview cited by the article, he said he looks for cases where market odds are being driven by headlines and sentiment rather than sober assessment. One example was a market tied to whether Donald Trump would win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. After heavy media attention, Trump’s odds reportedly rose above 15%. Buterin’s view was that the number reflected emotion, not a realistic chance of the event taking place.
Article points to two possible Polymarket accounts
The piece then tried to infer which Polymarket account could belong to Buterin, using the clues he shared publicly: about $440,000 in capital, around $70,000 in annual profit, and a trading style centered on betting that things would not happen. Based on those filters, the author narrowed the field to two accounts, momom and terremoto.
Both accounts reportedly fit the same broad pattern. More than 70% of their trades were bets against events happening, and neither appeared focused on crypto price speculation or sports markets. The article said terremoto’s deposits matched the overall capital figure, but the funds were split into dozens of transfers worth only a few thousand dollars each, with little wallet activity beyond moving money around. By contrast, momom was funded through several transfers of more than $100,000 each. Combined with the detail that only one of momom’s trades was a “Yes” position, the article argued that momom was the closer match.
The “aliens” market as a sample trade
To illustrate the method, the article highlighted a 2025 market asking whether the United States would announce the existence of aliens during that year. In March 2025, the probability of “Yes” was said to be around 10%. At a time when news coverage, commentary, and related claims were feeding public excitement, the candidate account allegedly took the other side and bet that the US would not make such an announcement within the next ten months. According to the article, that trade returned about 10%.
The point was not that the trader had unique access to hidden information. The edge came from rejecting a narrative rush and asking a simpler question: how likely is the actual resolution condition to be met? In markets like these, a burst of news flow can quickly inflate the “Yes” side, leaving the “No” side mispriced.
Returns came from repeated probability gaps, not one big swing
The article said Buterin’s results reflected more than directional calls. It argued that he understood how Polymarket resolves contracts and how temporary mispricings form when participants chase dramatic outcomes. The piece also mentioned that strategies of this kind can be combined with mathematical position sizing, including the Kelly criterion.
Using the figures disclosed in the interview, the overall performance was notable but not spectacular: about $70,000 in profit on roughly $440,000 of capital. The gains, according to the article’s reading, were built through repeated bets against overhyped outcomes rather than a single outsized wager.