Polymarket Airdrop farmers have become more ‘sophisticated’ as token launch looms

Users trying to exploit a potential Polymarket airdrop have ramped up their activity in an attempt to make it harder for the prediction market to rule them out. It follows recently Declutter report that Polymarket plans to release a crypto token once it regains a foothold in the United States – probably in 2026.

Last yearWith many users expecting a symbolic launch to follow the US elections, farmers bought and sold large positions to artificially inflate their volume. They did this in an attempt to position themselves for a larger allocation from a future token airdrop, which is often designed to reward the most active and avid users of a crypto protocol.

This method was extremely easy to spot and annoying for normal users as it clogged the activity feed, so much so that the pseudonymous Polymarket whale Fantom Betting said he would report them personally.

Now both Fhantom Bets and notable Polymarket user CSP trading told Declutter they believe farmers may have become more “sophisticated” in their efforts because that previous pattern has largely disappeared.

“It used to be pretty obvious. They were doing huge block buys of $50,000 against themselves – that was pretty clearly a straight-up wash trade,” CSPTrading told me. Declutter. “I don’t really see that for the sports markets I market; that’s the only reason I think they’ve become more ‘sophisticated,’ or have given up.”

Fhantom Bets agreed that airdrop farming on Polymarket seems less widespread than last year, but is confident people are still doing it. Previously, he said, wash traders were easily spotted because they often bought and sold shares of markets between two accounts.

Now, he speculates, wash traders are doing this with more than 100 wallets to prevent this from becoming an outlier. Fhantom Bets is now working on a project to identify these wash traders.

A pseudonymous trader known as Shady told Declutter that they farm the airdrop, but their method of doing so does not require wash trading. Instead, they have identified four criteria that they believe will be taken into account for the airdrop: volume, profit, providing liquidity, and the number of markets a user trades on.

“I think [the airdrop] is probably layered or follows a logarithmic curvebecause a large portion of the volume and liquidity rewards are done by such a small percentage of their users,” Shady shared. Declutter. “There are users and bots who trade eight figures in volume per month, while the average user probably doesn’t even trade six figures in volume. If they were to reward people linearly based on volume, it would create a distribution that is heavily skewed toward the top.”

As a result, Shady has simply used the prediction market in a way that optimizes its exposure to these potential criteria.

CSP Trading said Declutter he is fine with such a user being rewarded in an airdrop. Fhantom Bets jokingly said that he would hate it if anyone other than himself and his friends made money.

Forecasters on Myriad now believe there is less than a 15% chance of a Polymarket token being announced this year, down from 16.4% a week ago. Sources said Declutter that even if it were announced this year, it is likely that the token will not be launched until next year, as the platform looks to re-enter the US market – after it was effectively banned in 2022.

(Disclosure: Myriad was developed by Declutterparent company DASTAN.)