Anonymous Polymarket bettor allegedly pocketed $316,346 by backing Biden pardons

The bets

It has been reported that an anonymous trader on prediction market Polymarket netted $316,346 by correctly betting that President Biden would issue last‑minute pardons for Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and Adam Kinzinger. According to an exclusive analysis shared with NPR by Paris‑based Bubblemaps, the bettor placed about $64,000 in wagers on four of those names in the final hours of the administration, and had earlier placed a timely bet on Hunter Biden over gun and tax charges. The odds on those markets plunged to near zero before the pardons were announced — and the wins paid off.

How the trail was traced

Bubblemaps says its investigators used pattern‑matching AI to sift Polymarket transactions and found two accounts that consistently bet on pardons; the analytics firm allegedly linked them by tracing payouts to a shared Kraken crypto deposit wallet. Kraken enforces KYC rules, but identifying an account from a public wallet is still difficult, Bubblemaps' founder Nick Vaiman told NPR. Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.

Why it matters

"The odds of this happening by random chance are virtually zero," Columbia Law School’s Joshua Mitts told NPR — and he warned that such trades raise classic insider‑information concerns. He said the bettor could have been a White House insider, but added they might also have had access to non‑insider intelligence; federal prosecutors often find crypto trading trails that disappear into shell entities or other intermediaries. Prediction markets have been under scrutiny for years as a fast, fertile place for prescient — and potentially illicit — bets. Who knew Washington could look so much like a political thriller?

Sources: npr.org