Over the last 7 years, I've built the majority of my wealth by capitalizing on a series of strange, hard to describe opportunities that crypto has repeatedly presented.
In the past I've generally strayed away from going beyond the 280 character tweet limit on any of these. Sometimes because I don't want to invite competition to erode my edge while the opportunity is ongoing. Other times because I think there may be a grand total of 10 people that wouldn't lose all respect for me after seeing I wrote an in depth post about things like "cartoon animal credit cycles", as profitable as they may be.
For the first time in a long time, the new crypto thing I spent my last 30 days focused on felt fun, lucrative, and understandable enough to write about. I also think there are some useful takeaways from this experience that are reoccurring in all of my past notable wins that came from being early to a crypto product/platform. While it may not fit the bill as one of my biggest monetary wins in the space, it was way to fun and weird to not share so here it goes.
The Official Prediction Market Sponsor of the World Cup... Isn't Polymarket or Kalshi?
On June 12th I was sitting in a hotel watching the opening games of the world cup. If you watched any match this summer, you saw the same LED boards that I saw. They rotate through the same names every few seconds: Visa. Saudi Aramco. Adidas. Coca Cola. Qatar Airways. The most expensive advertising real estate in sports, reserved for companies that pay FIFA nine figures for a tier one sponsorship.
And then, sandwiched between them: ADI PREDICTSTREET: the official prediction market partner of the FIFA World Cup
...what?
How could it be that the two prediction market behemoths that have sponsored everything from the MLB to professional pickleball were outbid for the biggest televised event on earth by a platform I'd never heard of? These guys must have a ton of money. Maybe they have an incentive program I should look into.
After 10 minutes of back and forth with claude I had the only 3 pieces of information I needed about the platform to grab my wallet and deposit a few thousand bucks to start poking around:
- They launched trading two days prior and had just $30,000 of volume across all their markets (For reference, Polymarket and Kalshi do billions of dollars of volume per week)
- They had a leaderboard that claimed they were giving away thousands of tickets (If you know anything about me, you know that climbing crypto based leaderboards is my favorite game. Even Blast still has a special place in my heart after I accidentally sent what was once a $750,000 airdrop to the wrong address but thats a story for another day)
- The platform lives on top of a brand new Ethereum Layer 2 and to deposit you need to bridge to it, and then transfer over to the platform. (maybe 1000 of the 5 billion people watching the world cup know how to confidently navigate that)
All of this meant that for the next month ADI predict would have the biggest rewards pool relative to user count, the least amount of volume, and presumably the easiest leaderboard to climb of any prediction market.
Worst case scenario, I lose $5,000 gambling on the world cup. Best case scenario, I win a bunch of world cup tickets and have the best summer of my life.
Count me in.
You get a world cup ticket! And you get a world cup ticket!
ADI Predict Street: The official Oprah Winfrey of World Cup Tickets
Over the next couple days I started placing some test bets and trying to figure out the mechanics of the point system and leaderboard. During that time it felt like every crypto twitter account with more than 5000 followers was posting the same picture of them at the world cup, thanking @Predictstreet for providing them tickets. I was fairly confident that many of these folks had never actually used a prediction market, let alone ADI itself.
Surely enough, a member of the team @Morefious_ reached out to me shortly after and offered me a pair of tickets. He asked for nothing in return, and filled me in a bit more about how winning tickets would work. He would become my main point of contact for the rest month and was pivotal in resolving any issue I had while using the platform (on top of that he became a great friend).
I learned that there were two main ways to earn tickets: climbing the leaderboard + opening packs daily based on how much volume you do.
If they were giving out a pair to almost anyone without asking for anything in return, they were probably going to give a ton to their power users. I deposited a little more and began ramping up my volume.
Strategy #1: The Art of Betting a Lot and Making $0
Gambling can be fun, but I likely wasn't going to be able to finish at the top of a volume based leaderboard without taking substantial losses if my strategy was going to be hitting the hometown group chat with "who we got tonight?" for the next 35 days.
My initial strategy was going to be basic risk-neutral volume farming. In simple terms, I was trying to log as much volume as possible without actually risking any money.
Easy example (although with fees/pricing across markets it's never actually this straight forward):
France is playing Senegal. France has a 70% chance to win. I bet $70 on France to win using ADI. I then go on Polymarket and bet $30 on France to NOT win at 30%. Whether France wins or loses, I will lose $0 while logging volume and moving up the leaderboard.
thanks chatgpt
After my first couple days of running this strategy, I had leapfrogged 50,000 other accounts into the top 50 and already earned five tickets to group stage games from packs. It was working but I was bleeding a bit of money to fees.
I wasn't confident that this plan was good enough to get me to the top of the leaderboard without taking a bigger hit than I wanted to.
Lucky for me, after spending multiple hours a day on the platform watching all of ADI's order books, I found someone running an automated market making bot that seemed to be handing out free money to anyone that noticed.
Strategy #2: The Art of Betting on Things that Already Happened...?
On June 18th, Mexico beat South Korea 1-0. There was still 1 game left for each team in the group, but no matter what happened in those last games, Mexico had secured their placed as the winners of group A.
Polymarket and Kalshi quickly resolved "Who will win Group A?" to Mexico 100% a few seconds after the game. But something weird was happening on ADI. The odds for Mexico to win Group A were still sitting at 64%. I quickly bought up the entire market and moved the odds to 100% myself.
Nice! A free couple thousand bucks.
Mexico had already won the group, but the UI still hadn't updated the odds on my positions
I closed my laptop and figured I was done doing volume for the day. Later that night my friend pinged me.
"Yo are you seeing this Mexico shit???"
"Yea I already bought it all."
"Nah its literally refilling every 5 minutes"
...
I logged back in and couldn't believe what I was seeing. Every 5 minutes, a bot was offering around $2000 of "Mexico to win Group A" anywhere from 65-85%. In simple terms, it was handing out $300-1000 every 5 minutes to anyone that noticed.
I believe what happened here was that the bot was built using Polymarket and Kalshi as references on how to price its orders. The problem here was that PM and Kalshi had already closed this market so there was no reference, it was just placing orders at the midpoint between lowest ask and highest bid.
Needless to say, me and three friends stayed up all night depositing as much as we could into the app while cursing at each other on discord every 5 minutes any time we weren't the one that clicked quick enough to grab the free money (in hindsight any of us could've easily coded an auto buyer that night but where's the fun in that).
By the next morning, the bots profile looked like this.
sorry man, game is game
Overnight I had gone from betting not to lose, to the 2nd highest PnL on the app and had my highest volume day on the platform by a few multiples. Due to the relatively large amount of volume I'd also leapfrogged my way into first place on the leaderboard. My friends and I now made up 4 of the top 10 spots.
During this process, we earned a large amount of packs and a couple dozen tickets by opening them. We were starting to be rewarded for spending multiple hours a day staring at every corner of this new mysterious crypto app. We began planning out our flights across America.
The Next 30 Days
The weeks that followed were some of the best times of my life. I won't go into detail but I held onto my top spot all the way through the final snapshot by doing some variation of what I did on the Mexico market. It resulted in a boatload of tickets including front row seats to the final and a fairly decent profit trading on the platform over a few weeks.
My days consisted of waking up in a new hotel somewhere I'd never been in America, logging into ADI to do some volume and keep my top spot, and heading out to a stadium to meet (a few for the first time) a new anonymous crypto friend that I had spent hundreds of hours talking and trading with over the last few years. Shoutout to @poogazeth @FancyXBT @skyrocket @Morefious_ @6e6a6DeFi @maxwin, I wish I still pictured some of you as the cartoon animal in your pfp but alas.
I also got to take 8 of my closest friends and family to their first world cup games. Some of these experiences included private suites and lounges at the stadium which were going for upwards of $10,000 per seat. The look on my parents faces when they saw their country score was something I'll never forget. I never knew mom and dad could jump so high.
Conclusion
I think the main takeaway here is that if you spend enough time scouring through niche crypto apps you can still find these weird opportunities with outsized payoffs.
A lot of my edge in crypto has never really come from predicting the future but more from noticing when two venues or entities disagree about the present. NFT buyers willing to pay more than a piece is listed for on a niche marketplace/OTC, Lenders with stale offers offering higher loan amounts than the current floor of a project after a crash, platforms that allow you to sell your upcoming airdrops to willing buyers pricing your future tokens at more than what it costs to currently earn them... all weird stuff, I know.
In this case it was the 7th or 8th new prediction market. By the time the 7th or 8th version of a marketplace comes out you can cross reference against more mature ones and find two venues pricing the present differently (I could write a few more articles going in depth on different experiences I have with this but I'm lazy and probably won't).
At this point, when I hit a big win in crypto the dopamine usually lasts a day or so then wears off. "Cool I made a doctor's salary clicking a few buttons over the last week... now what". The real life experience yield that came from this opportunity is something that will stick with me more than any of my biggest wins in crypto.
For that, I'm extremely grateful to @Predictstreet (who I have no affiliation with outside of trading on their platform) for providing the opportunity and to @Morefious_ and the team for being quick to fix any issues I encountered while using the app. I look forward to seeing what you guys do after the world cup.
Anyways I hope my writing rust didn't show too much and that you enjoyed. My dms are always open for questions (or if you spot any interesting opportunities you wan't to ask about/share).
Thanks for reading and go Messi (If you ever get a chance to go to an Argentina competitive match, seriously do it. Completely different atmosphere from all the other games).
