Last updated: July 2026.
A 90% win rate looks like proof of skill. On Polymarket it usually isn't. Of the 70,711 wallets currently showing a 90% or higher win rate, about 61%, or 43,179 of them, are airdrop farmers. They never took a real position. They bought outcomes that were already all but settled, collected a few cents, and repeated it thousands of times to farm volume and a spotless record.
If you pick wallets to follow off a raw leaderboard, the math says you are probably copying one of them. Here is how to tell a farmer apart from a real trader.
How can I detect airdrop farmers on Polymarket leaderboards?
An airdrop farmer is a wallet with an average buy price above 95 cents. That single number is the fingerprint. Real traders take uncertain positions at a range of prices, so their average entry lands somewhere in the middle. A farmer's average sits near the top of the book, because the whole strategy is buying near-certain outcomes for the last sliver of profit. Sort a leaderboard by win rate, check the average entry price of the wallets at the top, and the farmers separate themselves.
OrcaLayer does this automatically. Every ranking is farmer-filtered by default, so the wallets you see have taken real risk. The exact rules are on the Farmer Filter page and in the full methodology.
What an airdrop farmer actually does
The play is simple and low risk. Find a market that will clearly resolve one way. Buy the winning side for almost its full value. Wait for settlement.
Say a market is going to resolve Yes. The farmer buys Yes at 96 cents. It settles at 1 dollar. That is 4 cents of profit on the dollar, near guaranteed. Do it once and it is pocket change. Do it across thousands of markets and you farm two things at the same time: a near perfect win rate, and the trading volume that qualifies for airdrop and rewards programs. The skill involved is close to zero.
This is why raw leaderboards mislead. Sort any unfiltered Polymarket ranking by win rate and the top is a wall of 95 to 100 percent records. It reads like a roster of geniuses to copy. Most of them are farmers, and a 96 cent entry is not something you can profitably copy anyway.
The three signals, in detail
Farmers are one of three kinds of leaderboard noise. OrcaLayer separates each one on its own, so any of them can be filtered independently.
Farmers. Average buy price above 95 cents. You do not accumulate an average that high by taking genuine, uncertain positions. Flagged and excluded from Smart Money.
Bots. More than 500,000 trades and an average trade size under 20 dollars. That is the signature of an automated market-making or micro-arbitrage program, not a person taking real positions.
Router contracts. Polymarket's own protocol contracts, the CTF and NegRisk exchange routers, sit on both sides of ordinary trades. Left in, a router can look like a single hyper-active insider wallet. Excluded platform-wide.
Across every trader OrcaLayer has indexed, about 114,000 are farmers, roughly 1 in 12, and they cluster exactly where they do the most damage: at the top of an unfiltered win-rate ranking.
Raw leaderboard vs farmer-filtered
| Raw Polymarket leaderboard | OrcaLayer, farmer-filtered | |
|---|---|---|
| Top sorted by win rate | Wall of 95 to 100 percent records | Wallets that took real positions |
| Farmers | Dominate the top | Flagged and removed |
| Bots and routers | Counted as traders | Detected and excluded |
| Can you copy the entries | Rarely, most sit near 1 dollar | Yes, real entry prices |
Once the farmers come out, the "flawless" leaderboard mostly disappears. What is left is the smaller, more honest set OrcaLayer calls Smart Money: a wallet with a 55 percent or higher market win rate, positive total profit, and no farmer flag. Just under 198,000 wallets qualify.
How to check a wallet yourself
If you want to vet a wallet by hand:
- Look at its average entry price. Above 95 cents is a farmer tell.
- Look at trade count and average size. Hundreds of thousands of trades at a few dollars each is a bot.
- Ask whether the wins came from real, uncertain positions or from near-settled ones.
Or open the OrcaLayer leaderboard, which applies all three checks by default and shows you which wallets took real positions. The full data story behind the filter is in the 470M-trade farmer analysis.
Frequently asked questions
How can I detect airdrop farmers on Polymarket leaderboards? Check a wallet's average buy price. Farmers sit above 95 cents, because they buy near-settled outcomes for a few cents of guaranteed profit. OrcaLayer flags every such wallet automatically and removes it from the rankings.
What percentage of high win-rate wallets are farmers? Of the 70,711 Polymarket wallets with a 90 percent or higher win rate, about 61 percent, or 43,179, are farmers.
Why do airdrop farmers have such high win rates? Because they only buy outcomes that are already almost certain, often at 96 cents or more. It produces a near perfect record with almost no risk and almost no skill.
How does OrcaLayer remove farmers? By three independent signals: an average buy price above 95 cents for farmers, over 500,000 trades with an average size under 20 dollars for bots, and Polymarket's own router contracts, which are excluded platform-wide. The thresholds are published in the methodology.
What is left after farmers are removed? Just under 198,000 wallets that OrcaLayer classifies as Smart Money: a 55 percent or higher market win rate, positive total profit, and no farmer flag.
Can I copy a farmer's trades to make money? No. Their edge is buying at 96 cents or more on near-settled markets, which leaves almost nothing for a follower and disappears once the market resolves.
What average entry price signals a real Polymarket trader? A genuine trader's average buy price tends to land in the middle of the book, because real positions are taken while the outcome is still uncertain. An average above 95 cents is the farmer tell, not the mark of a skilled trader.