Have you heard of such a story: the police announce they are about to catch a thief, and the thief profits greatly from this announcement.
This is exactly the plot that played out in the crypto space over the past 48 hours. In this storm, there were top detectives known as "on-chain police," crypto giants controlling billions in funds, rival foes vying against each other, and a tool that elevated the bizarre nature of the entire incident to another level—prediction markets.
Before starting this story, we need to introduce ZachXBT, who is hailed as the "on-chain detective." His method of working is easy to understand: he watches the publicly available yet anonymous transaction records on the blockchain, piecing together fragments like a puzzle to form a complete chain of criminal evidence.
He had previously tracked and exposed a $243 million Bitcoin theft targeting a single victim and disclosed several cases related to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus (with a total amount involved exceeding $200 million). On February 23, ZachXBT suddenly posted a pre-announcement:
On the 26th, he would reveal several employees of a crypto project using insider information for long-term insider trading.
As soon as the news broke, the prediction market Polymarket quickly launched a topic titled "Which company will ZachXBT accuse of insider trading?" and simultaneously mentioned 27 leading companies in the crypto field, such as the trading platform Binance with daily trading volumes in the tens of billions, the crypto market maker Wintermute accounting for 10% of global trading volume, and the token issuance platform Pump.fun with nearly $1 billion in revenue.
Due to the high quality of the information ZachXBT previously disclosed, the topic on Polymarket surpassed $10 million in trading volume just a few hours after its launch. By the evening of the 26th, ZachXBT officially announced that the involved company was Axiom, a decentralized trading platform that has approached $400 million in total revenue since its founding in 2024.
Shortly after the announcement, the topic then welcomed settlement, with total trading volume reaching nearly $40 million within 2 days. However, within this originally hot-topic driven native prediction market discussion, the unusual trading and the bizarre nature of the events behind it raised suspicions that this was a meticulously crafted script.
The "thief" bets "I will be caught" using insider information
Similar to options trading in traditional finance, in this incident, people could buy into a company's accusations of "yes" or "no." If ZachXBT ultimately accused the company, buying "yes" would profit, while buying "no" would become worthless.
In the market "ZachXBT will accuse Axiom of insider trading," two addresses stood out significantly, as they made excessive profits—one earned $350,000, and the other $160,000.
Spectators quickly uncovered the on-chain address 7QG2Le belonging to the same entity. They then discovered that this address was precisely the one mentioned by ZachXBT in disclosing insider trading, belonging to Axiom's Business Development Director Broox Bauer.
https://x.com/hxnterson/status/2027090149863989549?s=20
According to ZachXBT's post, Bauer used company internal tools to view all users' complete private wallet data and traded tokens ahead of users. 7QG2Le was one of the addresses ZachXBT disclosed that Bauer used for insider trading. ZachXBT also pointed out that he had notified the Axiom team before making this event public.
In other words, at this critical juncture, Bauer, who should have fled, not only remained calm after receiving ZachXBT's notification but also leisurely registered a prediction market account, deposited money, and bet on the fact that he would be accused. He ended up lying back and making $500,000.
Competitor insider who hired detectives for case investigation
Besides Bauer, there was another account that was also noteworthy: by betting on Axiom being accused, this account profited over 6 times, earning $411,000.
Due to its suspicious characteristics, shortly after this account made a profit, ZachXBT posted that he had analyzed the account and pointed out that it "was an Axiom user," implying that this account was relatively normal and operated within conventional parameters.
This indeed silenced some critics, however, soon after, X blogger omniviolence's analysis of this account elevated the absurdity of the situation to another level. Through detailed timeline analysis and on-chain tracking, this account was ultimately traced back to gorillacap, a partner at competitor company Pump.fun which has trading and token issuance attributes similar to Axiom.
https://x.com/omniviolence/status/2027035374246408517?s=20
How could ZachXBT, who built his reputation on uncovering the identities behind anonymous addresses, fail to discover this connection?
In ZachXBT's disclosed article, he also clearly pointed out that he was commissioned to investigate Axiom's violations and that the scale of this disclosure was far lower than his previous explosive revelations exceeding tens of millions of dollars.
After connecting numerous clues, a logical conspiracy theory surfaced: Pump.fun, in an attempt to undermine competitor Axiom, financed the most credible "justice police" in the crypto space, ZachXBT, to investigate potential violations.
After obtaining the investigation results, Pump.fun's partner gorillacap used the time advantage to pre-bet in the prediction market, earning $400,000 while leveraging ZachXBT's inherent traffic attributes to ruin Axiom's reputation.
Just as PolyBeats mentioned hours before ZachXBT's post about the two insider traders and their "public relations crisis insurance" theory, this sensational event in the crypto world once again illustrates the multiple roles prediction markets play among different groups: information dissemination, monetization of insider information, insurance hedging.
The narrative of the prediction market has begun to shape reality while also starting to influence the future.
https://t.me/PolyBeats_Bot/417
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
