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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says he made $70,000 trading prediction markets on Polymarket last year, not by chasing hot narratives, but by fading what he calls collective “madness.” The Ethereum co-founder framed the profit as a function of behavioral reflexes in thin, hype-prone markets, and used the conversation to surface a separate concern: oracle fragility in real-world event settlement.

Here’s How Ethereum’s Buterin Netted $70,000

In an interview posted by Foresight News reporter Joe Zhou on X, Zhou asked whether Buterin still used Polymarket after being active last year. “Yes, I made $70,000 on Polymarket last year,” Buterin replied. When pressed on sizing, he said his initial investment was $440,000, implying a mid-teens return that sits in sharp contrast to the more common retail experience of getting chopped up by headline-driven probability swings.

Buterin described his playbook as opportunistic mean reversion on sentiment rather than prediction as such. “My method is simple: I look for markets that are in ‘madness mode’ and then bet that ‘madness won’t happen,’” he said.

“For example, there’s a market betting on whether Trump will win the Nobel Peace Prize. Or some markets predict the dollar will go to zero next year during periods of extreme panic. When market sentiment enters this irrational ‘madness mode,’ I bet on the opposite, and this usually makes money.”

When Zhou asked where he tends to focus on Polymarket (crypto, politics, entertainment, economics), Buterin said his attention clusters around politics and technology, and reiterated that the edge, in his view, comes from arenas where participants are “caught up in a frenzy and irrationality.”

The more consequential part of the thread moved from trading style to settlement integrity. Zhou raised the question of informational asymmetries and “advance knowledge”, referencing online chatter around a Venezuela-related market and asked whether Buterin had seen similar dynamics. Buterin steered the answer toward oracle vulnerabilities, citing a wartime contract whose outcome hinged on a narrow operational definition.

He described a market on the Ukraine war that settled based on whether Russia “controlled a certain city,” where the smart contract defined “control” as control of the city’s most important train station. The oracle source, he said, was anchored to Institute for the Study of War (ISW) tweets and maps.

Then came the failure mode: “ISW employees, perhaps by mistake, or perhaps intentionally, hacked their own company’s system; their maps suddenly updated to show that the Russian army controlled the train station,” Buterin said. “This caused something that everyone thought had only a 5% probability (almost impossible) to instantly become 100% in the prediction market. Although ISW retracted the update the next day, the money may have already been paid out.”

For Buterin, the lesson is not merely that prediction markets can be wrong, but that the data supply chain they outsource to can be brittle in ways crypto participants systematically underestimate. “This reveals a huge problem: the security standards of current oracle data sources (such as Web2 news websites and Twitter) are too low,” he said. “They never imagined that a single message they posted would determine the ownership of $1 million on the blockchain.”

Asked how to solve the oracle problem, Buterin sketched two broad approaches. The first is a centralized trust model, effectively designating an authoritative publisher like Bloomberg. The second is token voting, a decentralized mechanism he associated with UMA. Buterin said confidence in UMA has been slipping due to a perceived game-theoretic weakness: if a whale coalition can dominate voting, minority “truth” voters can be punished economically, pressuring participants to mirror power rather than reality.

At press time, Ethereum traded at $3,010.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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El Salvador’s president shared his plan to use the profits made from Bitcoin in setting up a pet hospital on Saturday

El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele announced via a Twitter thread over the weekend that the recently netted Bitcoin profits would be redirected into funding a veterinary project. Bitcoin once again broke the $1 trillion market cap milestone as it surpassed $55,000 last week. El Salvador stood out as one of the gainers as the country’s Bitcoin Trust swelled.

President Bukele said that the country had gained about $4 million in profit from the most recent Bitcoin run. He added that the sum would be used to build a pet hospital in the country. He also clarified that none of the Bitcoin the South American country held in its reserve would have to be used for the hospital construction.

“By the way, we’re not selling any #BTC, we’re using the USD part of the trust since the BTC part is now worth more than when the trust was established. By the way, the Pet Hospital will probably appreciate in relation to the USD. #Bitcoin, on the contrary, is a deflationary currency,” he wrote.

The President also gave further details about the proposed hospital project, detailing that it would be equipped to handle 128 emergencies, 64 surgeries, 32 x-ray procedures and 384 consultations each day. The project marks one of the first major societal benefits from El Salvador’s Bitcoin decision, which will go a long way in mitigating how divisive it has been.

Prior to the official launch of Bitcoin as an official currency, some Salvadorans took to the streets to bemoan the decision, saying that it was an oppressive one. Some alleged that it was meant to extend the regime of Bukele. International bodies such as the IMF also chipped in and fired warnings to El Salvador before it officially launched Bitcoin as legal tender.

Most recently, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s Reddit post appeared to question President Bukele’s tactics in pushing for Bitcoin adoption. Buterin’s main point of contention is that the Salvadoran population lacked adequate education on cryptocurrencies.

“This tactic of pushing BTC to millions of people in El Salvador at the same time with almost no attempt at prior education is reckless and risks a large number of innocent people getting hacked or scammed. Shame on everyone (ok, fine, I’ll call out the main people responsible: shame on Bitcoin maximalists) who are uncritically praising him,” he said.