"My method is actually very simple," Vitalik Buterin said last week when asked how he made $70,000 in a year. "I look for markets that are already in 'crazy mode' and bet on them—that crazy things won't happen."
When the world descends into madness, rationality is the best arbitrage opportunity.
In an interview in Chiang Mai at the end of January 2026, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin publicly discussed his trading experience on the prediction market Polymarket: In 2025, he used an initial capital of approximately $440,000 and made a profit of approximately $70,000.
While this sum of money is insignificant to Vitalik, who is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, his trading strategies mentioned in the interview and his understanding of Polymarket's settlement mechanism indicate that he was not "just playing around," but rather that he had built a very sophisticated trading logic after thoroughly exploring the entire prediction market system.
To make it easier for the audience to understand, he also gave several specific examples: for instance, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who caused a great uproar last year, Trump has repeatedly stated publicly that he is the most qualified person to receive the award.
After being widely reported by the media, Trump's chances of winning the prize once exceeded 15%. Many traders believed that, given Trump's style, he would use various coercive and enticing methods to force the Norwegian Nobel Committee to compromise and award the prize to him.
Vitalik's assessment of this matter was straightforward: this 15% doesn't reflect the true probability, but rather sentiment. What I need to do is stand on the opposite side of sentiment and use reason to profit from that overestimated probability difference.
Starting with the statement "Trump won't win the Nobel Prize," we can deduce the origins of Vitalik's Polymarket account.
Based on clues revealed by Vitalik in the interview and Polymarket's mechanism for making traders' "trade records traceable," we can actually try to sketch out a profile of his account: $440,000 in principal, $70,000 in annual profit, and money made by betting that Trump would not win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
After a screening process, two accounts emerged: momom and terremoto.
Besides the fact that the principal and profits match, the trading logic of the two perfectly matches Vitalik's profit system based on "short sentiment": more than 70% of the trades are bets that something will not happen, and there are no trades related to speculating on cryptocurrency prices or the sports sector.
Further on-chain fund tracing revealed that while terremoto's fund deposit amount matched $440,000, the money was split into dozens of small deposits of several thousand dollars each, and there was no other activity between the multiple on-chain wallets besides fund transfers.
Momom's on-chain deposits consisted of several large transfers exceeding $100,000. Considering that only one of Momom's account transactions was a bet on "Yes," and that Terremoto's trading frequency was so high that he resembled a full-time trader active in the prediction market every day, we ultimately believe that Momom is more in line with Vitalik's profile.
If Momom is Vitalik Buterin: What exactly is his strategy?
Imagine this: Today is March 3, 2025. As a die-hard Trump supporter, you are absolutely certain that he is different from previous puppet presidents controlled by the deep state. In the year since Trump took office, he has fulfilled various campaign promises (ICE taking to the streets to arrest immigrants, imposing tariffs to "protect domestic businesses," etc.).
You also clearly remember that during his campaign he said he would push for the release of documents related to UFOs and aliens.
Just yesterday, you saw in news reports that US lawmakers were pushing for new legislation to establish a "UFO Task Force." And someone in the comments mentioned another related news item:
David Grusch, a former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official, revealed that the U.S. government had run a "decade-long UAP crash recovery and reverse engineering program" that recovered aircraft of "non-human origin" and "non-human biological remains".
When these clues are pieced together, you discover something incredible: Trump is very likely going to release the alien documents!
At this point, you see a prediction market stating that the probability of "Will the US announce the existence of aliens in 2025?" is only 10%. This means that Trump has nearly 11 months to release the relevant documents.
"This probability is seriously underestimated!" You came to this conclusion after looking at the news, comments, and even your own search results, and then placed your bet on "Yes".
This is a bet with a potential return of nearly ten times, and you consider it your most successful investment since the beginning of 2025. What you don't know is that the counterparty on the other side of the order book is Vitalik.
This is exactly what the account did last March: amidst a cacophony of market noise and a deluge of related media reports, he bet with a 10% probability that the US would not announce the existence of extraterrestrials within the next ten months. This trade ultimately yielded him a 10% profit.
Interestingly, the exact same betting pattern appeared again, and he once again bet that the event wouldn't happen this year. Even as of this writing, his trade is still losing money. You can even copy his trade at a price lower than Vitalik's cost price.
Conclusion
Only one month into 2026, various seemingly impossible events have repeatedly filled the headlines of major media outlets: Venezuelan President Maduro was abducted from his country by the United States like a chicken and transported back to the United States by helicopter; Trump did not even spare NATO allies in his attempt to take Greenland; and the Epstein Papers mentioned almost all the major American political and business figures.
Undeniably, we live in an era overwhelmed by uncertainty. In this context, "it seems like anything can happen."
The emergence of prediction markets translates this illusion directly into probability: every breaking news, every tweet, and every exaggerated media interpretation will briefly push up the price of "Yes" on a certain trading platform.
Many star traders, such as Vitalik Buterin, use the overestimation of probability to bet on the non-occurrence of a particular extreme event. After optimization through sophisticated trading systems based on mathematics and statistics, such as the Kelly Criterion, this strategy has become one of the most robust investment methods in predictive markets today.
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