CrowdIntelCrowdIntel reference
Polymarket & prediction-market glossary
Every term used across CrowdIntel — whale, insider, funding cluster, Bayesian win rate, scope edge, p-value — defined from scratch with the math behind it and how we measure it on-chain.
Polymarket insider
A Polymarket trader who bets with non-public information or against the consensus and wins at rates statistical models cannot explain by skill alone.
Polymarket whale
A Polymarket wallet that trades significantly larger positions than the median user — typically $5,000+ per bet or $100,000+ lifetime volume.
Prediction market
A market where participants trade contracts whose payout depends on the outcome of a future event — producing prices that aggregate crowd beliefs into probability estimates.
Funding cluster
A group of Polymarket wallets that received their initial USDC from the same source address and often coordinate trades — a signature of Sybil behavior or organized insider activity.
Bayesian win rate
A shrinkage estimate of a wallet's true win rate that combines raw wins-over-bets with a prior — preventing a wallet with 9 wins out of 10 bets from being treated as a 90% sharpshooter.
P-value (trading)
The probability that an observed win rate could occur by chance alone if the trader had no edge — used to separate genuine skill from lucky streaks.
Smart money (Polymarket)
Wallets with proven track records of winning more than random chance — used as a leading indicator of where prices will move on Polymarket.
Wallet clustering
The process of grouping blockchain wallets that are likely operated by the same entity, using shared funding sources, timing correlation, and behavior similarity.
Polymarket whale tracker
A tool that monitors large Polymarket wallets and surfaces their trades in real time — used by traders to follow smart money and detect insider activity.
On-chain trading analysis
The practice of drawing trading insights directly from blockchain transaction data rather than exchange-reported metrics — enabling verifiable, un-gameable analytics.
Scope edge
The gap between a wallet's win rate inside a narrow scope (one topic, one category, one market) and its global win rate — a signal that the wallet has information advantage in that specific scope.
Insider trading on Polymarket
Placing Polymarket bets using information not reflected in current prices — detected statistically via abnormal win rates, timing clusters near news, and coordinated wallet activity.
Polymarket leaderboard
A ranking of Polymarket wallets by performance — realized profit, win rate, or volume — used to find the platform's most successful traders.
Copy trading (Polymarket)
Mirroring the trades of a proven Polymarket wallet — manually or automatically — to try to replicate its returns.
Polymarket PnL
Profit and loss on Polymarket — the net USDC a wallet has gained or lost across all resolved and open positions.
Polymarket proxy wallet
The smart-contract wallet Polymarket creates for each user to hold funds and place trades — the address you actually see trading on-chain.
Negative-risk market (Polymarket)
A Polymarket multi-outcome market where mutually exclusive 'No' positions can be converted so outcome prices stay arbitrage-consistent — enabling efficient multi-candidate betting.
UMA optimistic oracle (Polymarket resolution)
The decentralized oracle Polymarket uses to resolve markets — a proposer asserts an outcome, and disputes are settled by UMA token-holder votes.
Wash trading (Polymarket)
Trading with yourself across wallets to fake volume or activity — inflating apparent liquidity or leaderboard rank without taking real risk.
Longshot bias
The tendency for cheap, unlikely outcomes to be systematically overpriced and heavy favorites underpriced — a persistent inefficiency in betting and prediction markets.
Market calibration
How closely a market's prices match real-world frequencies — a market is well-calibrated if outcomes priced at 70% happen about 70% of the time.
Polymarket API
Programmatic access to Polymarket data — market metadata, prices, and order books — plus third-party analytics APIs built on the underlying on-chain data.