Onchain data casts doubt on insider-trading theory in NYT's 'suspicious' election betting story

A New York Times report on Friday raised questions about a Polymarket trader's large, profitable bets on Senate races in Nebraska and Michigan. The bets were placed before certain Times/Siena polls were released, which led researchers to ask whether the trader had advance access to the results.

The Block's own analysis of onchain records — public data stored on blockchains, the shared ledgers behind crypto — found a broader trading history that the Times did not report. The analysis suggests other explanations for the wagers, though it does not fully rule out foul play.

Key points from the analysis

• The trader held its positions through Election Day rather than cashing out after the polls were released.
• The account placed a bet on the Michigan race while Times/Siena polling was still underway. The Times acknowledged both facts in its report.
• Linked wallets suggest the trader is a crypto whale — a holder of large amounts of crypto — with a history of big speculative trades and complex DeFi activity, short for decentralized finance, where users lend, trade, and earn returns without banks.
• The Block's analysis found the trader may have bet about $153,000 on the Nebraska race on Kalshi after the poll in question had been published.
• Two experts who reviewed The Block's findings said the evidence does not strongly suggest foul play.

What the Times report flagged

Vanderbilt University researchers told the Times that large, profitable bets on Polymarket and Kalshi were placed before certain polls on the Nebraska and Michigan Senate races were released. The polls favored the candidates the trader had backed.

The researchers identified a Polymarket user who bet $191,277 that Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Nebraska Republican, would win re-election. Most of that money was wagered in the early hours of Oct. 31, roughly an hour before a Times/Siena poll published at 5:05 a.m. ET showed Ricketts ahead by six points. The user made more than $77,000 on the race, according to the Times.

The same user bet $622,608 on a Democratic victory in Michigan's Senate race. At around 7:53 p.m. ET on Nov. 1, the Times published polls of Michigan and six other states showing Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed ahead by 11 points. The user made more than $180,000 when El-Sayed won the seat.

"There's a series of circumstances here that it's hard to write it off as a random occurrence," Brett Goldstein, who co-leads the prediction markets research team at Vanderbilt's Institute of National Security, told the Times. He said the activity "requires further investigation."

The Times report acknowledged it was unclear whether the trader had inside information. The researchers offered other possible explanations, and Polymarket told the paper it was conducting its own investigation.

What The Block found onchain

The Block matched the bets to a Polymarket account named dubdubdub2. On Oct. 31, the account bought $349,135 of "Yes" shares on a Democratic win in Michigan at 3:27 a.m. and $273,473 of "No" shares on a Republican win at 5:20 a.m. These are essentially bets in the same direction, and together they match the Michigan total reported by the Times.

The bets were unusually large for those markets. The Michigan purchases were the largest daily total by one account in any of the 16 Senate races The Block analyzed back to mid-September, and were nearly three times the next largest.

But the review of the trader's onchain history suggests the size of the bets was not unusual for the trader itself. The account has a long history of large, risky trades and complex DeFi yield-farming, which the Times did not report.

Other details also cut against the advance-knowledge theory. The Nov. 1 poll release covered seven states, and the biggest market reaction came in Kansas, where Polymarket's odds of a Democratic win jumped from about 52.5% to 60.5% within half an hour. In Michigan, where Democrats were already the strongest favorites at about 74.5%, the odds rose to about 79.5% over two hours. The trader did not bet on Kansas. Its market was much smaller, however, with about $1.9 million traded on a Democratic win through the election, compared with about $7.9 million in Michigan.

Tracing the Nebraska bets to Kalshi

The researchers told the Times that the trader sent large sums to Kalshi, a regulated US prediction market where users bet on event outcomes, and that large bets on similar markets followed. The report did not identify those bets.

The Block traced funds from wallets linked to the Polymarket account to a crypto payment provider used by Kalshi, then compared those deposits with Kalshi's public trade records. The records suggest the trader was betting on the same races on both platforms, in the same directions.

The Senate bets were funded by a separate wallet that also traded on Hyperliquid, a crypto trading platform. The Block linked that wallet to the one controlling dubdubdub2 through a history of transfers between connected addresses. Its five transfers to dubdubdub2's Polymarket deposit address on Oct. 30 and 31, totaling $850,000, match the account's deposit records to the dollar.

At 5:29 p.m. ET on Oct. 30, the betting wallet withdrew its remaining $2.2 million from Hyperliquid, where it had been trading over the previous day. About a minute later, it began sending funds to a deposit address that forwards money to a wallet labeled by blockchain analytics firm Arkham and Arbiscan as belonging to Zero Hash. Kalshi lists Zero Hash among its crypto deposit providers. The betting wallet sent about $1.39 million to the deposit address through Oct. 31. The Block found no earlier transfers to Zero Hash from the trader's known wallets.

Kalshi's data does not link specific trades to specific accounts. However, because six-figure bets were rare in Kalshi's Nebraska and Michigan Senate markets, The Block was able to match certain deposits to trades by timing and size.

Several deposits were followed within roughly a minute by large purchases. On Oct. 30, a $175,000 deposit at 5:30:08 p.m. was followed 31 seconds later by about $159,000 in purchases backing Ricketts at 66 cents. A further $157,000 deposit at 5:31:58 p.m. was followed at 5:33:29 p.m. by about $169,000 in bets against Dan Osborn, the Nebraska independent candidate, at 67 cents. Both positions backed the same election outcome.

At about 5:15 a.m. on Oct. 31, 10 minutes after the Times/Siena poll was published, Kalshi recorded about $153,000 in purchases backing Ricketts to win and Osborn to lose. The two groups of trades came eight seconds apart at prices around 75 cents, echoing the earlier paired purchases.

These trades are harder to attribute to the trader, though. They came about 50 minutes after a $250,000 deposit, while several earlier purchases followed deposits within roughly a minute. The deposit could also have funded bets in other markets.

What the experts said

Two experts who reviewed The Block's findings said that while foul play cannot be definitively ruled out, other explanations fit the evidence better. One of those explanations is that the trader is simply a crypto whale with a preference for large directional bets.

Rajiv Sethi, an economics professor at Barnard College, said the activity looked more like bets on the eventual election outcomes than an attempt to profit from the publication of the Times/Siena polls.

"I think these were just directional bets. Maybe they were based on non-public information such as privately commissioned surveys, but I don't think the Times/Siena polls were the information source," Sethi said.

What is confirmed and what is not

Confirmed from the sources: the Times reported the bets and the timing concerns; the bet amounts and profits are as the Times reported; The Block matched the Polymarket bets to the dubdubdub2 account; the wallet transfers and Kalshi deposit records are from public onchain data; and the market reactions in Kansas and Michigan are from The Block's analysis.

Still uncertain: whether the trader had advance access to the unpublished polls. The Times itself acknowledged this was unclear. The possible $153,000 in Kalshi bets placed after the Nebraska poll's release are harder to attribute to the trader than the earlier trades. Sethi's suggestion that the trader may have used privately commissioned surveys is his assessment, not a confirmed fact.

Why this matters

Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi let people bet real money on election outcomes. If traders were acting on unpublished poll results, it would raise questions about the fairness of these markets and the handling of poll data before release. The onchain evidence presented by The Block gives a competing explanation for the bets, which complicates the insider-trading theory but does not settle the question.

What happens next

Polymarket told the Times it is conducting its own investigation into the trading activity. The Vanderbilt research team's co-lead said the activity requires further investigation.

Sources

• The Block
• The New York Times