Draining the Bots: How a Trader Made $233K Exploiting Polymarket’s Thin Liquidity

A Polymarket trader ran a Wolf of Wall Street–level play overnight - made $233K by drained liquidity from trading bots and it flew completely under the radar.

The setup was brilliant and extremely simple.

A trader known as @a4385 made $233K overnight exploiting 15-minute Polymarket markets.

Saturday night. Liquidity is thin. Binance spot order books are shallow. On “XRP Up or Down — Jan 17, 12:45–1:00 PM ET” he aggressively bought UP at any price. His counterparties were trading bots. Polymarket market making is relatively straightforward, with low barriers to entry for solo devs and trading bots are now very popular. By the 10th minute of the market - XRP was down ~0.3% from the open yet he had pushed UP shares to 70¢. The bots saw an opportunity and walked straight into the trap selling him even more UP. 

~77K UP accumulated at an average price of ~48¢.

Two minutes before settlement, a wallet on Binance bought ~$1M USDT of XRP spot, pushing price ~0.5% higher. Seconds after settlement, the $1M spot buy was sold back.

Cost of the manipulation:
~0.25% slippage each way + fees.

With Binance VIP 4 level (0.06%) (quite easy to obtain)  and 0.25% slippage on both sides the total cost was ~$6,200; It may be less.

He ran the same play multiple times, cleaning out bot wallets by exploiting thin weekend liquidity. 

@a4385 - https://polymarket.com/profile/0x506bce138df20695c03cd5a59a937499fb00b0fe

Some bots were shut down in time. Others didn’t react fast enough and lost their entire balances - including https://polymarket.com/@aleksandmoney, which gave up a full year of profits.