In February 2026, ZachXBT published a report alleging that an Axiom employee had misused internal tools to access private wallet data. Before the full report dropped, he teased his findings on X. That tease alone sent Polymarket into overdrive — a prediction market formed around the investigation outcome, eventually attracting $40 million in volume.
Here's the irony: some traders appeared to have positioned themselves before even the tease went live.
We built a Dune Analytics query to look into it. We analyzed who bought, when, how much they risked, and what they earned — looking for patterns that point to advance knowledge.
What we queried
We targeted the Polymarket conditional token contracts on Polygon tied to the ZachXBT/Axiom market. Dune lets you write SQL directly against decoded blockchain data — every trade, position, and settlement is queryable.
We focused on position sizes, timing relative to the announcement, realized PnL per wallet, and fund flow patterns. The full query is public and reproducible — anyone can run the same SQL and check our work.
What we found
The highest PnL we identified in a single wallet was approximately $360,000 — from a position built before the report went public. Several other newly created wallets turned smaller bets into significant payouts within hours.
The behavioral signals were hard to ignore. Freshly created wallets appeared shortly before publication, funded through opaque exchange deposits, and immediately took large directional positions. Concentrated bets landed in narrow time windows before the announcement, with sizes that speculative trading doesn't explain. Several addresses showed activity only on this specific market — no broader trading history at all.
A prediction market about insider trading became the venue for what looks like more insider trading.
What the data can and can't show
On-chain data tells you what happened. It doesn't tell you who. Wallet addresses are pseudonymous, so these patterns are investigative leads, not proof of identity. Some traders may have independently anticipated the outcome.
We're transparent about those boundaries. The behavioral fingerprints are consistent with advance knowledge, but linking wallets to real people requires off-chain cooperation from exchanges.
Why it matters
Prediction markets are creating new venues for monetizing non-public information. When someone knows an announcement is coming — an investigation, a regulatory action, a partnership — they can profit from that knowledge on decentralized markets that are fully transparent yet pseudonymous. The data is all public. The challenge is knowing how to extract and interpret it.
Sources
- Dune Analytics Query #6879650 — Connect the Blox investigation query
- CoinDesk: ZachXBT Alleges Axiom Employee Conducted Insider Trading — February 2026