A Green Beret’s alleged $400,000 bet on a Venezuela raid appeared to be an isolated breach. A new report suggests it could be the visible edge of something larger.
The Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), a nonprofit research group, analyzed every Polymarket contract entered into between January 2021 and mid-March 2026 – more than 435,000 markets and $54.4 billion in cumulative volume – and found that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes win at rates difficult to explain by skill or luck.
In political markets, these “long-term” bets typically succeed about 14% of the time. In military-related contracts, success rates have sometimes exceeded 50%.
“Markets related to specific government policies, such as military, defense, and foreign affairs, are more difficult to forecast using public information alone,” the authors write, making them “more susceptible to information asymmetries,” including insider trading or expert knowledge.
In these markets, the gap between informed and uninformed traders can be the widest, creating conditions where a small group can consistently outperform not only by reacting more quickly, but also by knowing more.
For its part, Polymarket praises its market surveillance teams and its cooperation with the Ministry of Justice on the Venezuela file. Trading confidential knowledge is prohibited on the platform, just like on Kalshi.
Concentrated benefits
The ACDC report’s findings add to a growing body of research pointing in the same direction. A working paper from the London Business School and Yale found that around 3% of traders are responsible for the bulk of price discovery on Polymarket.
A separate analysis from blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs showed that the profits are even more concentrated, with less than 1% of wallets capturing about half of all gains. ACDC’s contribution is to suggest where some of this benefit might come from.
The report examines the June 2025 US strikes against Iran as a case study. Polymarket listed several date-specific contracts indicating whether a strike would take place. The markets linked to June 19 and 20 expired without incident and no long-term bets were won.
The strike took place at 6:40 p.m. ET on June 21. In the hours leading up to it, 19 long bets totaling $164,292 were placed on the contracts that ultimately resolved YES. Eight wallets shared about $1.8 million in profits, with one taking in nearly $500,000.
The Pentagon had designed the operation to be unreadable from the outside, using decoy bombers and long-range stealth aircraft to avoid detection. Despite this, a small number of traders placed large and timely bets on the outcome.
The model extends beyond a single event. In Polymarket’s military and defense category, the report reveals that in five of the six two-hour windows preceding market resolution, winning long bets outnumbered losing bets, contrary to what market prices suggest.
Longshot bets can outperform for other reasons, including poor pricing or changes in public expectations. But the consistency of trends, particularly in markets related to military decisions, suggests that some participants may operate with information advantages that others do not have.
ACDC, being a nonprofit research group funded by the Fund for Constitutional Government, has no surveillance products to sell, compared to Solidus Labs, whose recent Polymarket analysis doubles as a marketing pitch for the platform it licenses to Kalshi.
The ACDC’s recommendations include verifying the identity of bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious bets, restrictions on markets whose outcomes are decided by small groups, and limits on the granularity of contracts.
The report’s conclusion goes further, calling for “an evidence-based debate about whether the public should be betting on these outcomes.”
