How to find insiders on Polymarket

A Polymarket insider is a wallet whose resolved-bet performance diverges from what chance and skill predict for that category of market. This guide walks through the exact workflow CrowdIntel uses to find them.

The research question

"Is there a wallet on this market whose past performance suggests it knows something the crowd doesn't?"

Three filters answer that:

1. Sample size — has this wallet settled enough markets that any number computed from it means something?
2. Excess edge, corrected for multiplicity — does the wallet beat the base rate by enough to survive the fact that we tested three million wallets?
3. Category fit — does its record match the kind of market you are looking at?

Note what is not on that list: raw win rate. Win rate ignores the price paid, so a wallet buying 99¢ favourites will clear any win-rate bar you set while earning nothing. Use it to filter, never to rank.

Step 1 — Start from the market, not the wallet

If you're thinking about trading a specific market, start there. Open its page (e.g. /markets/will-x-happen-by-y). Look at the top-holders list.

Things to scan for:

• Single holders with outsized positions — one wallet with 10x the next holder's size is interesting. Either they know something or they're wrong by an order of magnitude.
• Multiple wallets that look similar — three wallets on the same side with similar sizing and similar age often turn out to be one operator.

Click any top holder to open their dossier.

Step 2 — Check the lifetime track record

On the wallet dossier, read the verdict chip first — human, bot or market maker, with the counts that produced it. A market maker's record is a spread business and is not evidence of information; a bot's may be, but not of the kind you can act on manually.

Then read the skill statistics rather than the headline percentage:

• Effective sample size. Positions correlated on one event count as one observation, not twenty. A wallet with 400 trades on three events has a much thinner sample than it looks.
• EV lower bound. Above zero means the edge survives its own sample. This is the number worth anchoring on.
• Skill q-value. The false-discovery rate at that threshold. It is what stops you selecting the luckiest wallet out of millions and calling it informed.
• PnL sign. A high win rate with negative PnL is a heavy-favourite buyer, not an insider. Scope edge covers the pattern.

Step 3 — Look at category edges

Scroll down to the category breakdown on the dossier. A wallet with 65% overall is mediocre. A wallet with 85% in Middle East conflict markets over 40 resolved bets and 50% elsewhere is very, very interesting.

The heuristic: real insiders have information in one narrow domain. A generic sharp has edge across markets; an insider has edge in their specific information lane. If a wallet's edge is concentrated in the category of the market you're researching, that's the strongest signal you can get without running a full investigation.

See scope edge in the glossary for the formal definition.

Step 4 — Check for cluster membership

Back on the dossier, look for a cluster badge in the header or the "Featured insider" ribbon. If the wallet is part of a published investigation, the case is already written and you can read it directly.

If no badge — run the funding check yourself:

1. Copy the wallet's funding-trail link on the dossier, or click through to Polygonscan.
2. Look at who funded the wallet originally (first USDC-in transaction).
3. Check that funder's transaction list on Polygonscan. If it also funded other wallets that are now betting the same market, you've found a likely cluster that CrowdIntel hasn't yet opened an investigation for. Email us with the wallets — we'll run it through the detection stack.

Step 5 — Verify against the market context

Before trading on a candidate you've found, sanity-check:

• Did the wallet place its position before or after public news broke? If before, insider signal strengthens. If after, it's just a sharp trader reacting faster than the market.
• Is the position size consistent with the wallet's history? A wallet that normally bets $1K suddenly putting $250K on one market is suspicious at any level of past edge.
• Are there obvious counter-positions? If an equally credible wallet is on the other side, the signal weakens — two insiders disagreeing means the information isn't as certain as it looks.

Step 6 — Ship your note

If you're going to trade on this research, write down your thesis before you click buy. Link to the wallet dossier and the market page. You'll want this paper trail whether you win or lose — it's how you learn what worked.

Common mistakes

• Anchoring on win rate — a 90% wallet with 8 resolved bets is nothing, and a 99% wallet at 99¢ entries is worse than nothing. Rank on the EV lower bound.
• Ignoring the multiplicity problem — with three million scored wallets, thousands clear p < 0.01 by chance. The q-value exists for exactly this.
• Ignoring PnL sign — a high win rate with negative PnL is a favourite-buyer.
• Confusing size with information — a wallet that bets $1M and loses $500K is a whale, not an insider.
• Cherry-picking the category — a wallet at 90% on one narrow topic needs a real sample in that topic, not overall.

Tools on this page

• /screener — rank and filter every indexed wallet
• /investigations — published cases
• /cohorts — system-built groups with published floors
• /glossary/scope-edge — formal definition of scope edge
• /methodology — the public overview of the detection stack

Frequently asked

How do I know the wallet isn't just lucky?

That is what the q-value is for. A p-value asks whether one wallet's record could have happened by chance; a q-value asks how many wallets in a set at that threshold got there by chance. Testing millions of wallets makes the second question the only one worth asking. Pair a low q-value with an EV lower bound above zero and a real effective sample, and you have taken luck as seriously as it deserves.

What if the wallet has high WR but low volume?

Lower priority. High-WR low-volume wallets might be insiders keeping their footprint small, or they might be careful hobbyists. Without volume, you can't size a copy-trade off them anyway.

Can I ask CrowdIntel to investigate a specific wallet?

Yes — email security@crowdintel.xyz with the address and your reasoning. If it clears our threshold, we'll open a formal investigation.

Next

• Screener — the columns and filters this workflow runs on.
• How to read an investigation — what a published case has already cleared.