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Vitalik Made $70K Betting Against “Crazy Things” on Polymarket – Here’s How

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed he earned $70,000 on prediction market platform Polymarket final 12 months by way of what he calls “anti-insanity mode,” a technique of betting in opposition to irrational market frenzy.

The disclosure got here throughout an in depth interview with Foresight News in Chiang Mai, the place Buterin outlined his rising issues that crypto purposes are diverging from their unique missions regardless of important technological progress.

Buterin’s revenue technique concerned figuring out markets caught in “loopy mode” and wagering that unlikely occasions wouldn’t materialize, together with bets in opposition to Donald Trump successful the Nobel Peace Prize and the greenback collapsing to zero throughout panic intervals.

The feedback arrive as prediction market adoption surges, with Polymarket app installs leaping 1,200% between January and December 2025, whereas weekly buying and selling quantity throughout platforms exploded from $500 million to almost $6 billion.

Three Urgent Missions Driving Ethereum’s Direction

Buterin framed his present motivation round three escalating issues that stretch past technical improvement into existential threats dealing with the crypto business.

“My largest worry proper now’s that the complete business will finally degenerate into a spot for 100% cryptocurrency hypothesis, with solely conjecture and no actual purposes,” he mentioned.

Beyond this “doomsday state of affairs,” Buterin emphasised the necessity to enhance Ethereum’s know-how, notably by making Layer 2 networks more efficient and decentralized whereas catching up with Web2 user experiences.

His third precedence addresses a darker chance.

“If we fail with Crypto, the long run technological world may very properly be utterly dominated by Centralized AI, which might be a really harmful future,” Buterin warned.

He positioned cryptocurrency as “our protection in opposition to this pattern of digital totalitarianism and for sustaining range and freedom within the technological world.“

When Technology Succeeds, But Applications Fail

The Ethereum founder recognized a basic disconnect rising throughout blockchain improvement over the previous 12 months that threatens the business’s broader objective.

“Over the previous 12 months, Ethereum has made super progress in scaling know-how,” Buterin defined, noting gasoline capability will increase from 30 million to 60 million with targets reaching 300 million this 12 months.

However, a latest community analysis report from MigaLabs exhibits that Ethereum has struggled with data-heavy blocks since December’s Fusaka upgrade, with missed-slot charges climbing above 1.7% when blob counts exceed 16.

Despite these challenges and advances, he additionally expressed deep concern about application-layer stagnation, arguing that prediction markets stay the one sector exhibiting explosive development in 2025, but even these platforms expose important issues.

Buterin criticized Polymarket’s focus on short-term bets, similar to hourly Bitcoin value actions and weekly sports activities outcomes.

“These short-term bets don’t have a lot social significance in the long term,” he mentioned, advocating as a substitute for mechanisms with long-term incentives like Robin Hanson’s Futarchy idea, at present being examined by MetaDAO, the place prediction markets decide governance strategies reasonably than simply betting outcomes.

When requested about precedence purposes, Buterin emphasised decentralized social networking first, adopted by “smarter” DAOs that transfer past easy token voting.

“It can’t simply be about issuing a token and having a vote,” he mentioned. “Developers have to suppose extra deeply: What are the precise targets of this group? What form of governance construction finest matches these targets?“

As these infrastructure challenges persist, the Ethereum Foundation recently elevated quantum resistance to a prime strategic precedence, allocating $2 million in funding and a devoted Post Quantum staff.

Oracle Vulnerabilities Threaten Prediction Market Growth

Buterin highlighted vital safety flaws in present oracle techniques that might undermine the reliability of prediction markets as adoption accelerates.

He recounted a Ukrainian battle market wherein the Institute for War Studies’ maps served as the info supply for figuring out Russian management of a practice station.

“ISW workers, maybe by mistake or deliberately, hacked their very own system, and their maps all of a sudden up to date to point out that Russian troops managed the practice station,” Buterin defined.

This induced an occasion with a 5% chance to grow to be sure immediately earlier than ISW retracted the replace the subsequent day.

Current Oracle options face severe limitations. While centralized fashions like Bloomberg require trusting a single entity, decentralized token-voting techniques like UMA undergo from game-theoretic flaws that permit whales to control voting outcomes.

“Even in case you vote for the reality, in case you oppose the bulk, the system will choose you because the loser and you’ll lose cash,” Buterin mentioned, forcing members to vote with whales reasonably than fact.

Despite Buterin’s warning, the Prediction Market economic system is booming. Polymarket returned to the U.S. market following CFTC approval with ultra-low 10-basis-point taker charges, whereas the corporate secured a $2 billion funding from Intercontinental Exchange at an almost $9 billion valuation.

The put up Vitalik Made $70K Betting Against “Crazy Things” on Polymarket – Here’s How appeared first on Cryptonews.

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