Vitalik won $70,000 by betting on Polymarket's crazy predictions

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, shared his trading strategy on the Polymarket prediction market in an interview with Foresight News. He mentioned that he usually looks for markets in “crazy mode” – where extreme emotions dominate – and bets that exaggerated scenarios will not happen.

Buterin revealed that he invested approximately $440,000 in Polymarket and earned $70,000 in profit (equivalent to 16%) in 2025, thanks to the “contrarian betting” strategy. According to him, prediction markets help identify irrationality and bring prices closer to reasonable levels.

However, Buterin warned about the risks from oracles – systems that connect real-world data to the blockchain for settling bets. He cited an example of a market related to the Russia–Ukraine conflict, where the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) map was hacked on X, causing the results to be temporarily inaccurate, which could generate profits of up to 33,000%.

Buterin believes this incident shows that the security of oracles still has many vulnerabilities that need to be addressed in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.