Polymarket trading bots

The claim

“>Close your laptop on Friday >Leave $2,000 running on a Claude-built Polymarket bot > Open it Monday morning > $2,000 → $9,300 > The bot was scalping 5-minute BTC Up/Down markets the entire weekend. > 15 minutes to set up. > Zero babysitting. > Pure edge. > Welcome to 2026.”

@AleiahLock, 10 April 2026, 1,367,613 views¹

Polymarket is a website where people bet on yes-or-no questions. A bot is a program that places bets by itself. The tweets say an AI such as Claude can write it for you¹.

The sums

Turning $2,000 into $9,300 over a weekend takes about 85% growth a day for 2.5 days (our estimate)¹.

Taking an offered price in a crypto market costs up to 3.5% of the stake (our sum). Posting an offer and waiting, as a “maker”, costs nothing².

Polymarket’s public data, on our reading of its undocumented fields, shows what accounts keep after fees and rebates (fee money handed back)⁵⁰. Four accounts that tweets call bots kept between 0.53% and 2.4% of the dollars they bet (our estimates)⁵⁰. At those rates, earning $10,000 a month means betting $2,000 about 200 to 950 times over (our sums)⁵⁰.

What happens to most people who try

• All traders. One analyst studied 2.5 million Polymarket wallets (accounts holding a trader’s money) from April 2024 to April 2026 and found 84.1% in the red²⁰.
• Bot-run wallets, after the current fees. Bitquery, which sells blockchain data, counted 3,362 machine-run wallets over nine days in August 2026: 34.4% finished ahead, against 37.8% of other wallets⁶².
• Heavy players in the tweets’ own markets. In one August 2026 week in the short crypto markets, 32.2% of the 1,554 wallets that played more than 500 markets finished ahead. The middle one lost $101.61⁶³.

The upside

Some accounts do well. Polymarket’s data confirms their profit, not who runs them or what wrote their code⁶¹.

• The largest accounts that Bitquery classes as machine-run (profit checked; operators unknown). Swisstony kept about $21.0 million on about $1.0 billion bet, about 2.1% (our sum). It lost money in its first two months⁶¹⁶².
• New accounts under the current fees (checked; operators unknown). Of last month’s top 50 crypto accounts, 35 joined since April 2026⁶⁰⁶¹. x-MoneyForWhiskas joined in June 2026 and kept about $275,000 on $18.2 million bet⁶¹. This is a list of winners, so it includes luck, and a new wallet may belong to an experienced operator⁶⁰⁶¹.
• One small operator (profit checked; the rest is his own statement; he sells nothing we saw). “Kacho”, a data engineer⁷⁴, says an AI wrote almost all of his bot’s code⁵⁷ and that he started with about $1,000⁵⁸. Polymarket’s data shows his wallet has kept about $5,786 since January 2026, on $140,154 bet⁶¹.
• The top groups. Of the 2.5 million wallets, about 8,000 (0.32%) made more than $10,000 in total²⁰.

A realistic good result in the first year or two (our estimate, from two small operators, one of them unchecked) is a few thousand dollars in total for a competent programmer who finds a quiet niche, and tens of dollars a month for a simple bot without one²⁸⁶¹.

What it takes to compete

• An edge that is not prediction. An edge is a repeatable reason your bets earn more than they cost. Kacho’s bot took a fair price from bookmakers’ odds and posted maker offers in esports (video-game contest) markets, where the gap between buying and selling prices was unusually wide⁵⁷.
• Volume (the total of all bets placed) and money. The 50 accounts with the highest all-time crypto profit mostly kept 0.4% to 5% of the dollars they bet (our sums)⁶⁰⁶¹. Three new accounts that kept $53,500 to $275,000 bet $2.4 million to $18.2 million⁶¹.
• Fresh data and speed. The share of markets where Kacho’s offers were taken fell from 37% in January to 1% in April, as faster bots arrived and he spread into sports markets⁵⁸.
• Programming skill. Polymarket’s guide expects live data feeds and a kill switch (a way to cancel every open order at once)⁶.
• Time. The largest accounts took months to grow⁶¹. A typical machine-run wallet in one count ran for 4 months⁶².
• An allowed country. The main site bars the US, the UK, France, Germany and others⁸⁹.

Tools cost tens to a few hundred dollars a month (our estimate)⁷¹.

How to tell early (our judgement): count profit after fees, because Polymarket’s profile page shows it before fees⁵⁰. Never paste your wallet’s secret key into code you did not write³⁴.

Who else makes money from it

None of these needs your bot to profit.

• The platform. DefiLlama, a tracking site whose method we did not check, shows users paid about $103 million in fees over the last 30 days; Polymarket kept about $15.1 million⁴³.
• Large makers. In crypto markets, 20% of the fees paid goes back to makers³. One large maker wallet shows about $698,562 in rebates and rewards (payments for keeping offers open); the small operator above received $43⁶¹.
• People who refer others. Polymarket pays referrers 10% of the fees of people they bring in¹³.