The interesting thing about prediction markets
Polymarket is fully on-chain. Every position, every trade, every win and loss is public information sitting on Polygon. You can look up any user's wallet, see exactly what they've bought, what they've sold, what they've cashed out on. There are no closed funds. There are no protected portfolios.
It's a remarkable property of the platform. Anywhere else — equities, forex, sports — the people who consistently win don't show you their book. On Polymarket, they have no choice.
And yet, most users never look at this data.
That's a small mystery I've been chasing for a few months. Below is what I learned, the signals that actually mattered, and the Telegram bot I ended up building because manually tracking wallets is impossible.
Step 1: who are the sharp wallets?
The first thing is finding wallets worth watching. Polymarket publishes a public leaderboard ranked by realized PnL over different time windows: today, this week, last 30 days, all-time.
A few observations from staring at it for a while:
Lifetime PnL is misleading. A wallet at the top of "all-time" might have ridden one massive market and been quiet since. What you actually want is consistency over a recent window — last 30 days is the right zoom level. Sharp wallets stay near the top across multiple time windows; flash-in-the-pan wallets sit on the all-time list and nothing else.
Win rate without realized PnL is misleading too. A wallet that wins 80% of the time by buying 90¢ favorites is barely coming out ahead. The honest pair is win rate and realized PnL together. Better yet, win rate by category — most sharp Polymarket wallets are specialists. Someone who calls political markets 73% of the time may be 45% on sports.
This is the first lesson: the leaderboard isn't a ranking of "best traders," it's a sampling of "people who happened to do well on the metric and window you picked." Read it as a candidate list, not a verdict.
Step 2: what do you actually look at?
Once you have a few candidate wallets, you click into their profile (polymarket.com/profile/0x...). What's there:
- Closed positions — every market they've resolved, with realized PnL per market.
- Open positions — what they're currently holding, mark-to-market.
- Activity feed — every trade with timestamp, market, side, size and price.
This is more than enough to build a real signal. The trades I learned to notice:
A trade much larger than the wallet's usual size. A whale doing a routine $500 trade is a routine $500 trade. The same wallet putting on its largest position of the quarter — that's the moment worth knowing about. The simplest version of "conviction" is just the multiple of the wallet's recent median trade size.
A trade in a market that isn't moving yet. Sharp wallets often enter days before a market starts to shift. By the time the headline lands, they're already positioned. Watching the price chart against the wallet's entry timestamp is genuinely informative.
Multiple sharp wallets converging on the same side of a market. When one wallet has a view, it's one signal. When five wallets you've identified as sharp all take the same side within a short window — that's a pattern. It's not a guarantee of anything, but it's hard for any one of them to fake.
Position exits. "Smart money is leaving" gets less attention than "smart money is entering," but it's just as informative. A wallet that sized up then quietly unwound usually saw something.
None of this is novel. It's how anyone watches markets where the book is public.
Step 3: why this is unsustainable manually
For about a month I tried to track ten wallets by hand — bookmarks, a spreadsheet, refreshing pages, an ad-hoc Telegram group with myself.
It doesn't work. Polymarket trades around the clock. The signal you cared about happens while you're asleep, or at lunch, or in a meeting. By the time you refresh, the trade is hours old and the price has moved.
The on-chain transparency turns into a curse: the data is public, but the only way to use it is to stare at it continuously, which no human will do. What's missing is the boring infrastructure to watch for you.
What I built
PolySignal is a Telegram bot that does the watching. You pick wallets from the live leaderboard (one tap each), and it pings your Telegram the moment they trade. Each alert carries:
- Wallet, side, outcome, market.
- Size and price.
- The wallet's track record from its closed positions: win rate, realized PnL, ROI.
- A "conviction" line when the trade is materially bigger than the wallet's usual size.
- A line confirming the data is on-chain on Polygon — the source is verifiable.
It's read-only. It doesn't connect to your wallet, it doesn't trade, it doesn't ask for keys. It's an information service over public data — closer in spirit to a market-data terminal than to a typical crypto-Telegram tip channel.
Two features matter more than they look:
The activation moment. A new user follows five wallets in one tap and immediately sees a representative alert, so they understand the product before any trade happens. The hardest part of an alert tool is the empty-watchlist day-one experience.
Consensus alerts. When three or more of the wallets you follow take the same side and outcome of the same market within a day, you get a single consolidated alert. This is the signal you can't easily get from looking at any individual profile.
The free tier batches trades every 15 minutes. The paid tiers (priced cheaply on Telegram Stars while we collect conversion data) get real-time alerts, category filters, a daily digest, and custom alert rules.
A small honest note
I've tried to position PolySignal as what it actually is: an information tool, not advice. Polymarket isn't available in every region — that's the user's responsibility to check, and the bot says so. Past results of any wallet are past results. None of this is a prediction or a recommendation.
If you find the public-on-chain-data observation interesting and you've been on Polymarket: try the bot. Tell me what's broken. The link is t.me/PolySignalAlertsBot?start=devto — feedback comes to me directly.
