41 trades earned $70,000. How does the Ethereum founder play the prediction market?

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin turned a $440,000 principal into a $70,000 profit in one year on Polymarket. His strategy is simple: when the market is going crazy, bet that extreme events won’t happen, using rational arbitrage to offset emotional premiums. This article is adapted, translated, and written by Dongqu from the original piece by BlockBeats.

(Background recap: V神 announces Ethereum Foundation’s new phase: “Moderate tightening” over the next five years, personally adding 16,384 ETH to increase investment)

(Additional background: Mass slaughter! Bitcoin dips to 75,000, hitting a 10-month low; Ethereum drops below $2,500; over 420,000 traders get liquidated)

Table of Contents

• When the world goes crazy, rationality is the best arbitrage
• Starting from “Trump won’t win a Nobel,” reverse-engineering Vitalik’s Polymarket account
• If momom is Vitalik: what exactly is his strategy?
• Conclusion

My method is actually very simple. When asked last week how I made $70,000 in a year, Vitalik Buterin said, “I look for markets that are already in ‘crazy mode,’ then bet—these crazy things won’t happen.”

When the world goes crazy, rationality is the best arbitrage

At the end of January 2026, during an interview in Chiang Mai, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin openly discussed his trading experience on the prediction market Polymarket: in 2025, he used about $440,000 as principal and earned approximately $70,000 in profit.

Although this amount is insignificant to Vitalik, whose net worth is in the hundreds of millions, his mention of trading strategies and understanding of Polymarket’s settlement mechanism indicate he isn’t “just playing around.” After deep digging into the entire prediction market system, he has built a very comprehensive trading logic.

To make it easier for listeners to understand, he also gave several concrete examples: for instance, last year, the highly debated Nobel Peace Prize winner, Trump, publicly stated multiple times that he was the most qualified to receive the award.

After extensive media coverage, Trump’s chances of winning briefly exceeded 15%, leading many traders to believe that, given Trump’s style, he would use various threats and coercion to force the Norwegian Nobel Committee to ultimately award him the prize.

Vitalik’s judgment on this matter was straightforward: that 15% was not reflecting the true probability but rather the market sentiment. My approach is to stand opposite to that sentiment, using rationality to profit from the overestimated probability gap.

Starting from “Trump won’t win a Nobel,” reverse-engineering Vitalik’s Polymarket account

Based on clues revealed by Vitalik in the interview and Polymarket’s mechanism of “verifiable trader performance,” we can attempt to sketch his account profile: $440,000 principal, $70,000 annual profit, making money by betting that Trump won’t win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

After a filtering process, two accounts emerged: momom and terremoto.

Besides the principal and profit matching, their trading logic perfectly aligns with Vitalik’s “short sentiment” profit system: over 70% of trades are bets that something won’t happen, with no trades related to speculation on coin prices or sports sectors.

Further on-chain fund tracing revealed that although terremoto’s deposit amount matches $440,000, the funds were split into dozens of small deposits of several thousand dollars each, with no activity between multiple on-chain wallets besides fund transfers.

Momom’s on-chain deposits, however, consisted of a few large transfers exceeding $100,000. Combining this with the fact that momom’s account only made one “Yes” bet, and considering terremoto’s high trading frequency—more like a full-time trader active daily in prediction markets—we conclude that momom more closely fits Vitalik’s profile.

If momom is Vitalik: what exactly is his strategy?

Imagine: today is March 3, 2025. As a die-hard Trump supporter, you’re convinced he’s different from the puppet president manipulated by deep state actors. Since Trump took office, within a year, he has fulfilled various campaign promises (ICE cracking down on immigrants, tariffs to “protect domestic industries,” etc.).

You also clearly remember that during his campaign, he said he would push to release documents related to UFOs and aliens.

Just yesterday, you saw news reports about US lawmakers pushing new legislation to establish a “UFO Task Force.” And in the comments, someone mentioned another related news:

A former US Air Force officer and intelligence official, David Grusch, revealed that the US government has operated a “decades-long UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program,” recovering “non-human origin” spacecraft and “non-human biological remains.”

Connecting these clues, you realize something incredible: Trump is very likely to release alien files!

At this moment, you see that the probability of the prediction market “Will the US announce the existence of aliens in 2025?” is only 10%. This means Trump has nearly 11 months to release related documents.

“This probability is seriously underestimated!” You conclude this after reviewing news, comments, and additional searches, then place a bet on “Yes.”

This is a potential tenfold return bet, and you consider it your most successful investment of 2025 so far. What you don’t know is that the opposing side in the order book is Vitalik.

This is exactly what that account did last March: amid numerous market noises and overwhelming media reports, he bet that the US would not announce the existence of aliens within the next ten months when the probability was only 10%. That trade ultimately yielded him a 10% profit.

Interestingly, the same odds appeared again, and he bet again that the event would not happen this year. As of writing, that trade is still in the red. You could even follow with a lower cost basis than Vitalik.

Conclusion

Only a month into 2026, various previously seemingly impossible events have repeatedly made headlines: Venezuelan President Maduro was snatched from his country by the US and flown back to the US like a chicken, Trump, to seize Greenland, even targeted NATO allies, and the Epstein files nearly mention all major US political and business figures.

Undeniably, we are living in an era overwhelmed by uncertainty. In this context, “it seems anything could happen.”

Prediction markets translate this illusion directly into probabilities: every breaking news, every tweet, every exaggerated media interpretation can temporarily push the “Yes” price of a certain odds.

Many star traders like Vitalik exploit overestimation of probabilities to bet that extreme events won’t happen. After optimizing with mathematically and statistically sound systems like the Kelly criterion, such strategies are among the most robust investment methods in prediction markets today.