Suspicious Polymarket Trader Made $320K on Last-Minute 2025 Biden Pardons

In brief

• A Polymarket trader made $320,000 correctly betting on Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons with perfect timing.
• Two linked wallets placed high-risk bets with low odds and won every time, raising possible insider concerns.
• The trades add to broader scrutiny of well-timed bets on political events and calls for tighter oversight.

A supremely well-timed Polymarket trader netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit betting flawlessly on former President Joe Biden’s last acts in office, newly surfaced on-chain data has revealed.

Last year, on Biden’s final day in office, two connected Polymarket accounts correctly chose four of the five individuals the president pardoned in his final hours at the White House. None of the bets they made were inaccurate—and even as odds related to the pardons dropped close to zero as Biden’s presidency expired, the wallets doubled down by increasing their positions.

All in all, the wallets netted $320,000 in profit on Biden pardon-related wagers, and had a 100% win rate on such markets. The connection between the two wallets was discovered this week by blockchain sleuthing firm Bubblemaps.

REWIND: 🇺🇸 Someone made $300,000+ predicting Joe Biden’s last minute pardons with a 100% win rate:

Adam Schiff, Hunter Biden, and more 🧵 pic.twitter.com/Ozxo0jairi

— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) April 16, 2026

The wallets correctly predicted that Biden would issue pardons during his final minutes in office to anti-Trump Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger, California Senator Adam Schiff, and the former president’s brother, Jim Biden.

The wallets also correctly wagered the prior month that Biden would pardon his son, Hunter.

The January 20 bets had incredibly low odds when they were placed, given Biden was just hours away from losing the powers of the presidency. The odds of pardoning Adam Schiff, for instance, sat at just 6% when one of the wallets made its wager.

A $21,711 bet made on the Jim Biden pardon stood just 11% odds of paying out when it was made—and, within minutes, netted a $198,220 return. 

The revelation of the potentially suspicious trades comes as the Trump administration faces scrutiny for numerous bets made in the last several months—on prediction markets, futures exchanges, and the stock market—that have come just prior to crucial market-moving actions or statements from the White House, and quickly collected billions of dollars.

The size and timing of such wagers has generated enough scrutiny that the White House quietly directed staff last week not to place bets on sensitive topics including the ongoing Iran war.

Earlier Thursday, CFTC Chair Mike Selig came under fire during a congressional hearing over his willingness to investigate such trades, if the potential misconduct might trace back to President Trump’s inner circle.

A Bubblemaps analyst told Decrypt the suspicious Biden-related trading they identified this week looks very similar to the type that has come under scrutiny during the second Trump administration.

“For suspicious trades we search for the pattern of big, well-timed bets across several connected wallets,” the analyst said. “This is exactly what we found in the Biden pardon case here.”

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