Polymarket’s “swisstony” makes $12 million while 68% of users lose money, Financial Times analysis finds

A Financial Times analysis of blockchain data says the anonymous Polymarket account “swisstony” is the platform’s most profitable trader, with $12 million in gains from sports betting. The same dataset shows that 68% of users who bet more than $100 on Polymarket ended up in the red — a useful reminder that prediction markets are still a capital-recycling machine, not a charity.

1. The analysis, published by the Financial Times and based on data from April 2026 onward, examined 170 million bets placed by 1.2 million individual accounts on Polymarket. The point was to identify the best-performing users financially over the period, not just the loudest ones.
2. Two broad winning styles stood out. Some users made large returns on a small number of high-risk bets, including stakes of more than $1 million on a single position. Others, including “swisstony” and the account RN1, used high-volume strategies that appear to have been driven by algorithms.
3. “Swisstony” placed 184,000 bets across 113,100 different markets. Starting in June, the account reportedly made at least one bet per hour for 26 consecutive days. It never had more than $17 million exposed at once, but continuously recycled capital and still turned over $657 million in total bets. With an average return of just under 2% per trade, volume did the heavy lifting.
4. Chris Park, founder of MSR Decode, said “swisstony” is “essentially a very good bettor” who profits by picking contracts that “seem cheaper than the value assigned to them by professional bookmakers.” According to Park, most of the gains came from taking prices offered by other traders, rather than using more complex mechanisms.
5. RN1, by contrast, keeps standing buy orders on both sides of a market in search of arbitrage opportunities. Park described that model as “playing the role of the house” in a traditional betting system.

Other notable traders were concentrated in World Cup outcomes. One user, mintblade, profited by backing Saudi Arabia to hold Uruguay and New Zealand to survive against Iran; both matches ended in draws. Another, fishalive, made just two bets, both tied to a scoreless draw between Spain and Cabo Verde. One position placed $440,000 on Spain not beating the African side, a bet with an implied probability of only 9% and a potential profit of $4.7 million. The same user also staked $3.85 million that Spain would not win by more than 2.5 goals. Cabo Verde held on.