Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has disclosed the strategy he uses on the prediction marketplace Polymarket in a recent interview.
Buterin told Foresight News that he looks for markets in what he calls “crazy mode” and bets that “crazy things won’t happen.”
“For example, there’s a market betting on whether Trump will win the Nobel Peace Prize," he said. "Or some markets predict the dollar will go to zero next year during periods of extreme panic.”
Buterin claims he has made $70,000 on Polymarket in 2025 on a stake of $440,000, representing a gain of roughly 16%.
The Ethereum founder added that his strategy of betting against extreme market sentiment “usually makes money.” He encouraged bettors to seek out markets “where people are caught up in crazy and irrational predictions” if they want to profit.
Loxley Fernandes, CEO at prediction market Myriad (owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan), argues that Buterin’s profiting predicting that “obviously crazy things wouldn’t happen” is “the most honest endorsement of prediction markets you can get.”
“When irrational sentiment and emotional extremes leak into markets, rational actors don’t just make money, they pull prices back toward reality,” he said, adding that, “That's the social function that prediction markets are designed to serve, to provide signal in the midst of noise."
Prediction markets and oracles
In the interview, Buterin also discussed what he sees as key issues currently affecting betting platforms like Polymarket, particularly around how oracles function. These oracles are third-party services that act as bridges, connecting real world data to the blockchain.
He cited an example involving a prediction market tied to the Russia—Ukraine conflict, which bet on whether the Russian army would control a specific city—in this case, Myrnohrad.
The oracle for the market was anchored to maps from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S. nonprofit research institution, which were posted on X, which defined “control” based on which army controlled the city’s train station.
After the institute’s X account was hacked, its maps were suddenly updated to show Russian troops controlling the train station. The offending information was then removed the next day, according to an apology from the Institute. The exact volume of payouts was not officially disclosed, but Ukrainian local media reported that some bettors may have had payouts over 33,000%, with trading volume of roughly $1.3 million.
Buterin highlighted cases like this as evidence that prediction market oracles have “far too low security” standards.
“They never imagined that a single message they posted would determine the ownership of $1 million on the blockchain,” he told Foresight.
Buterin proposed multiple approaches to addressing oracle issues. The first, which he described as a centralized model, would involve trusting a reputable news provider such as Bloomberg to supply data.
The second approach involves token-based voting systems, such as those used by UMA.
“A reliable oracle is very important because almost every DeFi project now requires one,” Buterin said. “If you want to develop real-world applications—such as putting real estate on-chain or predicting elections—you need an oracle.”
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