84% of Polymarket Traders Are Losing Money, New Research Finds

84.1% of all Polymarket traders are in the red, according to new research published today, April 6, by independent on-chain analyst Andrey Sergeenkov.

The report looked at 2.5 million wallet addresses, analyzing data from on-chain transactions on Polygon, via Dune Analytics. Sergeenkov found that over the past year, only 2% of traders have ever made more than $1,000 in their entire history on the platform, and just 0.033% — or 840 addresses — have earned $100,000 trading on Polymarket.

Sergeenkov also took on the claim that traders can earn a living on Polymarket, analyzing the odds of consistently earning $5,000 per month — just below the average monthly salary in the U.S. — and found that those odds are less than 1% in any single month.

Sustaining profits is even rarer. “Most traders show up, trade for a short period, and leave,” the report summarizes. The odds of earning $5,000 a month drop with each consecutive month, the research found. Among the 6,600 traders who earned an average profit above $5,000 per month, just 2.6% stayed active for more than a year.

A separate study from December 2025 analyzing 124 million trades on Polymarket found that 70% were unprofitable.

The findings land as Polymarket continues its mainstream commercial momentum, earlier this month becoming MLB’s exclusive prediction market partner, as The Defiant reported.

Polymarket is currently the largest on-chain prediction market platform, and the second-largest more broadly, with $9.8 billion in notional trading volume over the past 30 days, following Kalshi with $12.5 billion, per Token Terminal.

Meanwhile, a new referral program as of this month is set to drive another wave of retail signups via influencers — a dynamic Sergeenkov warns could deepen the loss problem without better user education.

Prediction market volumes grew 130x from 2024 through 2025, and the sector has received increasing regulatory attention, especially in the United States. In recent months, the Trump administration’s CFTC has taken a clear stance in favor of federal oversight of prediction market platforms via the agency, recently launching a sweeping review of the sector.

Adding another layer to Polymarket’s ambitions, the platform has also just today unveiled Polymarket USD, a new proprietary stablecoin set to replace bridged USDC.e as the platform’s collateral token, as part of what the platform is calling a significant infrastructure upgrade.

As The Defiant has reported, Polymarket’s crowd-sourced odds are increasingly cited as among the most accurate forecasting tools available, a reputation that sits uneasily alongside these numbers for individual traders.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.