Did Polymarket traders call the US airstrikes on Iran in advance?

We looked at three different markets on Polymarket to analyse the claim that certain Polymarket traders exhibited patterns consistent with advanced knowledge regarding a potential US airstrike on Iran.

Across the three markets, we focused on the 42 traders with the highest PnL from these three markets and the 8,142 trades they placed. One wallet of particular interest belongs to a trader pseudonymously named (pseudonyms are auto-assigned by polymarket) ‘Careless-Bug’. 

Polymarket Trader Modus Operandi

The wallet was newly created with no prior trade history and immediately began deploying capital across a small cluster of expirations on “US Strikes Iran by…” markets. In total the user spent around $60K in premia and ultimately made $468K in PnL betting on an eventual strike against Iran. This rapid-fire deployment of capital across a targeted set of accounts distinguishes this trader from others with high PnL on these markets.

What does the trader’s entry of a number of different expiries suggest about their knowledge of the US military’s plans? While they did not have exact details on the specific date and time, it is very possible that even President Trump was aware of a particular window within which the strikes were planned to occur, but not an exact time.

In addition to the quick deployment of capital once bridged onto polymarket, Careless-Bug quickly redeemed their capital once the market had resolved and bridged it back out. This gives the following Sankey diagram as a hallmark of their onchain activity to match the finger print of their trading activity.

The process, in chronological order: 

1. GREEN: The capital was first bridged in from an unknown chain
2. BLUE: All capital was deployed to polymarket bets
3. ORANGE: The payout of winning polymarket bets was paid to the user by polymarket
4. RED: The capital was first bridged out from an unknown chain.

How many others?

‘Careless Bug’ was not the only trader to have won significantly either. Our analysis uncovers a number of other profitable traders who earned profits of more than $100K across these three expirations. 

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Since ‘Careless Bug’ by far earned the highest payout betting on an eventual US airstrike and showed clear hallmarks of acting on targeted advance information, we used their account as a benchmark for identifying other potential wallets. We developed a “profile” of each of the high-activity traders and their full history of trading data, measuring five metrics in particular (shown below). These included factors such as

1. How long each account had been active before first trading the Iran-strike markets 
2. How many different markets they had traded in overall 
3. What share of their total activity was concentrated in these specific target markets. 

The results suggested some degree of heterogeneity among the wallets. The median account had been active for about 39 days before entering one of the three target markets. However, the distribution is wide: some of the accounts, such as ‘Careless Bug’ traded immediately, while others had been active for well over a year. Additionally, the median number of unique markets participated in was 98, though some traders had engaged in thousands of different contracts — suggesting not all the wallets were created to trade this one event in particular.

Several other traders stand out, appearing to have some matches with the MO of ‘Careless Bug’. The two traders usernamed ‘Roeyha2026’ (pseudonymously ‘Gargantuan Scenery’) and ‘nothingeverhappens911’, (or ‘Wet-Film’). They had spent $50K and $4.3K respectively to earn nearly $100K of profit across only two markets. Both accounts were created on Feb 28, 2026 – the day of the airstrikes themselves. 

Other accounts such as ‘Aware-Initialize’, ‘Sunny-Corduory’, and ‘Courteous-Epoch’ hold similarly high scores and recorded similarly high returns on their bets. However, each of these accounts took a higher number of positions in a wider range of Iran-linked markets, has not since bridged the entirety of their profits, and continues to hold active positions in Iran strike markets. These accounts better fit the profile of a well-informed (or better connected) trader.

The other traders with top scores do not match the profile (despite recording high PnLs on the Iran markets) – other accounts traded markets on a wider range of topics (such as crypto or sports markets), had older account ages, or simply did not earn a high enough return to imply a strong advanced signal.

Have we seen this story before?

The most recent escalation of the US-Iran conflict is not the first time we’ve seen signs of traders acting on information not publicly available to the wider market. It’s also not the first military operation carried out by the US under President Trump this year. 

On Jan 3, 2026, the US launched a military strike in Venezuela and captured the incumbent Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. A similar analysis of YES / NO contracts entitled “Maduro out by __?” again points towards evidence of certain traders who earned significant profits by betting YES to the US striking Venezuela with newly-made Polymarket accounts. 

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One such user, with the pseudonym name ‘Burdensome Mix’ made over $400K in profits from these contracts, from a total premium of $32.5K. That user had only traded across four markets in total, all related to the Venezuelan attack and made his account on Dec 27, 2025, days before the first expiry they had bought.

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Another wallet which made significant profits betting on Maduro contracts was ‘French Incense’. According to our Wallet risk score metric, that user ranked even higher than ‘Burdensome Mix’ given that it began to trade almost immediately after its account creation. 

While others match the profile in some ways (very young accounts, high-conviction directional bets on relevant markets) few others recorded the same out-sized returns, instead paying far more in premia for their eventual payoff.

Another possible hint is that many of these traders first placed bets on “Madura Out in 2025” – bets that ultimately resulted in a loss of the premium paid – before eventually winning on later expirations.

While at first this appears to cloud the signal that these accounts may have had, it is possible that the original Operation to extract Maduro was initially planned to occur in late December, instead of the Jan 3, 2026 mission. Trump appears to have confirmed as much when speaking after the raid:

"We were going to do this four days ago, three days ago, two days ago, and then all of a sudden it opened up. And we said: go".

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