Prediction Market
|6 min ReadDid A Google Executive Rig Polymarket With Search Rankings
Tariq Al-Saidi
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
When Polymarket listed a contract on “who will be Google’s most searched person of 2025,” traders treated it as a celebrity horse race. The usual suspects dominated the early odds: the pope, Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, a handful of big political names. Buried at the bottom of the screen sat a row of obscure entries like d4vd, Mikey Madison and Andy Byron that barely registered as more than noise.
Into that noise stepped one address, 0xafEe, that traded the market like he already knew the punchline.
From Joke Ticket To Million Dollar Win
Roughly a week before Google unveiled its Year in Search rankings, 0xafEe began quietly scooping up “yes” shares on d4vd at rock bottom prices. In prediction markets, price maps directly to implied probability. At that point the market was assigning almost no chance to d4vd topping the list. For most traders this was a cheap lottery ticket. For 0xafEe it was the opening leg of a much larger structure.
On chain history shows that the address has pushed close to ten million dollars of volume across Polymarket. So a twenty thousand dollar punt on a long shot did not move the needle. It looked like a hobby trade by someone used to size.
The real break with normal whale behavior came days later. With no public schedule for when Google would release the rankings, the same address suddenly began aggressively loading up on “no” across the big names. The pope, Trump, Swift, New York’s new mayor and other headline choices all saw heavy waves of “not this one” orders. Slippage and price impact did not seem to matter. The address treated every popular candidate as dead on arrival.
To most observers this looked insane. A rational whale usually accumulates over time, hides footprints and hedges. Here the trader burned seven figures in a concentrated, visible bet against the entire field. Telegram and X chatter labelled him a rich degen with more money than sense.
Then Google dropped the list.
At the moment Year in Search went live, the top slot did not belong to the pope or Trump or any other front runner. It went to the previously ignored d4vd. On Polymarket the chart went vertical. In seconds, d4vd’s line rocketed from the bottom of the probability range to almost one hundred percent while every other contract collapsed to zero.
By the time the dust settled, 0xafEe’s early d4vd position was worth roughly twenty times cost. All the “no” positions on the famous names also cashed. On that one market alone the address booked more than a million dollars of profit in a single day.
Scrolling further down the wallet’s positions, on chain sleuths found that this was not a one off. In a parallel market on “top five Google searches of 2025,” the same address held ten positions that all settled in the money after nearly five hundred thousand dollars of total stake and roughly two hundred ninety thousand dollars of unrealized gains. Seven additional markets tied to Gemini product release timelines showed a similar pattern. Every bet tied to Google paid out.
In other words, anything that depended on a Google decision resolved exactly the way this whale positioned.
Insider Trading Or Someone Who Can Rewrite The Outcome
At first glance this looks like textbook insider trading. Someone with access to internal launch calendars and Year in Search drafts quietly front runs retail in a public market. But further chain analysis made the story darker.
The address is linked to the ENS name adorableraccoon.eth. Before the Polymarket trades heated up, this wallet had pledged more than fifteen million dollars worth of ETH as collateral on Aave. That level of on chain wealth makes it unlikely that we are looking at a junior engineer. It aligns more with a senior insider or even someone in Google’s leadership orbit.
That is where the line between “information edge” and “system control” begins to blur. Google’s Year in Search rankings are not a raw count of queries. They come from an internal algorithm that is extremely sensitive to short term spikes, filters and thresholds. Anyone who helps design or approve that algorithm can, at least in theory, tilt outcomes by changing parameters or by directing attention.
If you can nudge the inputs that define what “top search” means, you do not just know the result in advance. You can manufacture the result you have already bet on. In that world a prediction market is no longer a tool that surfaces collective expectations. It is a cash-out venue for people who have the power to adjust the underlying reality.
That is why this case unnerved so many traders. It hints at a new class of player who does not merely trade on non-public information but actively edits the data that settles the market.
What It Means For Prediction Markets And Crypto
For years, prediction markets have been sold to crypto natives as a way to crowdsource truth. Prices on Polymarket and similar venues are supposed to represent the best available forecast from a global hive mind. This episode shows how fragile that assumption becomes once the outcome depends on a centralized, opaque institution.
Here, the “oracle” was effectively Google itself. If a well placed insider can influence rankings or release timing, then the market is not predicting an independent event. It is tracking one person’s incentives. The informational advantage is absolute. No amount of analysis, polling or trend monitoring can offset the fact that someone in a position of authority can click a button and force your contract to expire worthless.
For crypto traders in Brazil, the Middle East and elsewhere who have embraced prediction markets as a serious asset class, this raises hard questions. Should platforms impose limits on insiders betting on events they can directly influence. How do you even identify those insiders when they can route orders through anonymous wallets and ENS names. At what point does a “truth market” become an attractive vector for quietly monetizing corporate power.
The Google case is unlikely to be the last confrontation between prediction markets and insiders who can shape their own odds. As more real world data feeds into on chain contracts, the industry will need to decide whether it is comfortable letting people who author the future also trade it. If not, both protocol designers and regulators will have to move fast. Otherwise this will not be the story of one Google whale beating the crowd. It will be the template for how those who control the systems behind our feeds quietly turn markets that were meant to predict reality into instruments for writing it.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.