Most Polymarket Traders Lose Money; 0.04% Took $3.7B

An on-chain analysis by a researcher known as DeFi Oasis found in December 2025 that 0.04% of Polymarket wallet addresses captured more than $3.7 billion and over 70% of all realized profits on the platform.

Arizona Rep. Yassamin Ansari posted the finding on X, calling prediction markets ‘casinos where the rich and powerful are the house and everyone else is the chips.’ Analysts said Ansari’s post mixed two measures: the 0.04% figure refers to the share of winnings captured, not the share of users who ever made any profit.

A separate analysis by analyst Andrey Sergeenkov, published in April 2026, examined 2.5 million Polymarket wallets and found that 84.1% of traders had not made a profit. Sergeenkov attributed part of the decline in profitability to an influx of inexperienced users around the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, writing that ‘less experienced users tend to trade less successfully.’

Earlier academic research in 2025 by Felix Reichenbach and Martin Walther estimated about 70% of users lost money. Sergeenkov said the higher 84.1% figure reflects methodological differences: his calculations adjust for wallet splits and merges, which he said can make an address appear more profitable when not accounted for.

The data provide more detail on the distribution of gains. Of the 2.5 million wallets analyzed, 2% had ever made more than $1,000 in total, 0.32% had cleared $10,000, and 840 wallets, about 0.033%, had earned more than $100,000. The average trade size on Polymarket was $89. Eighty percent of traders never placed bets averaging more than $500. Only 0.98% of traders ever recorded monthly gains equal to the U.S. average monthly salary of roughly $5,000; 35 wallets sustained that level of monthly income for a full year.

Prediction markets processed roughly $28 billion in trading volume by 2025 across platforms including Polymarket and Kalshi. The Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, completed a reported $2 billion deal with Polymarket in March, and Kalshi raised $1 billion in funding that pushed its valuation to about $22 billion.

Policy responses followed the data. Ansari is co-sponsoring the BETS OFF Act with Sen. Chris Murphy and Reps. Greg Casar and Rashida Tlaib; the bill would ban betting on outcomes such as war, terrorism, assassination and certain government decisions. Rep. Mike Levin introduced separate legislation called the Death Bets Act. Both bills are not widely expected to pass in the current Congress.

Prediction markets allow people to place bets on future events and use the resulting odds as a form of crowd-sourced forecasting. Backers argue the markets generate signals about probabilities; recent analyses report that most individual traders on Polymarket lost money while a small share of wallets captured a large portion of realized profits.