Polymarket Allegedly Paid Adin Ross Millions to Promote It as Insider-Trading Scrutiny Builds
A Wall Street Journal investigation reports that Polymarket struck a multimillion-dollar promotional deal with streamer Adin Ross, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. The platform and its marketing contractor, Virality, targeted dozens of Ross’s videos for promotion. In at least five of those videos, Ross ‘identified ways he could use inside information to trade on the platform.’ More broadly, the Journal found Polymarket paid clippers to push at least 19 videos that walked through using inside information or other ways to game markets.
Polymarket told the Journal it prohibits trading based on stolen information, illegal tips, or information obtained in breach of a duty of trust or confidentiality, pointing to a market-integrity framework covering monitoring, on-chain transparency, and escalation to regulators. The company formalized those rules in March and added a Chainalysis surveillance partnership in late April.
This echoes wider industry insights: Pierre Lindh, co-founder of iGaming media group Next.io, has called insider trading the hardest problem prediction markets face. Discussing on camera how one might trade on inside information, and being paid to promote a platform, is not the same as trading on inside information, but the framing is awkward for a company that has spent the past year trying to shed exactly that association.
Polymarket is still working to bring its exchange back onshore in the U.S. after a 2022 CFTC settlement and has been expanding into perpetual futures and other products. A campaign pairing celebrity reach with inside-information talking points cuts against the regulated image the company needs to win over U.S. users and regulators. The company told the Journal it would conduct a comprehensive audit of its active promotional content. This is the second disclosure flap to hit the company this month: a separate POLITICO investigation found its chief marketing officer paid more than two dozen influencers at least $350,000 to talk up Polymarket on X, most without disclosing the arrangement.
Ross is already a defendant in class-action litigation over allegedly deceptive gambling promotion tied to the casino platform Stake.us. Representatives for Ross and Drake declined to comment.