Leverage scales market-price manipulation linearly while shifting outcome-manipulation thresholds and multiplying informed-trading rents in three distinct ways, calling for re-allocated regulatory attack surfaces rather than net reduction.
Per-Market Information Leakage and Order-Flow Skill: Two Methodological Lenses on Informed Trading in Decentralized Prediction Markets
2 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
April 2026 saw notable methodological convergence in the academic study of informed trading on decentralized prediction markets. Three approaches surfaced almost simultaneously: Mitts and Ofir (2026) apply a composite screen to over 210,000 wallet-market pairs; Gomez-Cram et al. (2026) apply an event-level sign-randomization test to Polymarket's complete transaction history, classifying 3.14% of accounts as "skilled winners" and separately flagging 1,950 accounts as "insiders" via a lifecycle heuristic; Nechepurenko (2026) develops the Information Leakage Score (ILS) framework, which quantifies per-market information front-loading at an article-derived public-event timestamp. This paper provides a methodological comparison. The central claim is that these are three distinct layers of detection, not competing methods on a single layer. Sign-randomization is best understood as an account-level test of persistent directional skill conditional on opportunity selection -- not a direct test of insider trading, and not a per-market measure. The heuristic insider flag is separate from the skill classifier, applies to a population the classifier excludes by design, and has unknown precision. The Polymarket sample pools politics, sports, crypto, and other categories with different information technologies, so a platform-wide "skilled winner" classification is mechanism-ambiguous. The January 2026 U.S.-Venezuela operation cluster, where the DOJ indictment of Master Sergeant Gannon Van Dyke provides a rare external enforcement benchmark, illustrates how the layers stack: lifecycle heuristics identify suspicious accounts; legal investigation addresses non-public-information possession; per-market scoring would quantify how much information was leaked into each contract. A combined pipeline gains in precision because each layer filters a different dimension.
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q-fin.TR 2years
2026 2verdicts
UNVERDICTED 2roles
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The paper organizes seven canonical variants of event-linked perpetual futures along four design axes, supplying payoff definitions, inheritance rules from prior work, and variant-specific constraints.
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Manipulation, Insider Information, and Regulation in Leveraged Event-Linked Markets
Leverage scales market-price manipulation linearly while shifting outcome-manipulation thresholds and multiplying informed-trading rents in three distinct ways, calling for re-allocated regulatory attack surfaces rather than net reduction.
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A Taxonomy of Event-Linked Perpetual Futures: Variant Designs Beyond the Single-Market Binary Case
The paper organizes seven canonical variants of event-linked perpetual futures along four design axes, supplying payoff definitions, inheritance rules from prior work, and variant-specific constraints.