Overview
- Solidus Labs, which published new figures Wednesday, reports that 0.55% of profitable maker wallets and 0.26% of winning taker wallets each captured roughly 50% of gains in late‑2025 to early‑2026 politics markets, or about $8 million out of roughly $16 million per group.
- Bloomberg’s review of active wallets since 2025 finds more than 100,000 addresses lost at least $1,000, and removing the top winners leaves the rest of users with a combined net loss of $131 million.
- Solidus flags patterns consistent with wash trading in some markets at roughly 15% of volume, enabled by binary contracts where buying both sides can create volume without profit or loss.
- Some of the flagged activity may reflect volume chasing tied to speculation about a future POLY token airdrop that could reward trading activity rather than clear attempts to manipulate prices.
- Prior academic work from London Business School and Yale found about 3% of traders drive most price discovery, while Solidus, a surveillance vendor that sells its HALO system and has a deal with rival platform Kalshi, says the new concentration data strengthens the case for tighter monitoring.