# What wallet tracking shows, and what it cannot

A Polymarket fill is a public transaction and a regulated exchange position is not, so wallet analytics exist on one venue and not the other.

*https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/what-wallet-tracking-shows · background to Prediction Market Analytics & Dashboards*

**Answer:** Wallet tracking shows one thing: which address settled which position, on a venue whose fills are recorded on a public chain. That is Polymarket, and not a regulated US exchange, where per-account positions are reported to the Commission rather than published. It does not show who an address belongs to, how many addresses one person runs, or what anyone knew before the market moved. A leaderboard rank is a record, not a measurement of skill.

A dozen cards in this catalogue read Polymarket wallets, and most of them sell the reading rather
than the record: smart money, informed flow, the account that was positioned before the news. The
record underneath is real, public and free to check. Nearly everything printed on top of it is a
model, and the distance between the two is the whole of this page.

Start with the fact that decides whether any of it applies to the venue you actually use. Wallet
analytics exist because a fill on Polymarket is a transaction on a public chain. They cannot exist
in that shape on a CFTC-regulated exchange, because what a regulated market publishes is
market-level and what identifies an account goes to the regulator.

## How it works

### Why the flow is visible at all

Polymarket's exchange contract describes its own design plainly. The repository README calls it a
[hybrid-decentralised model](https://github.com/Polymarket/ctf-exchange) in which "there is an
operator that provides offchain matching services while settlement happens on-chain,
non-custodially", swapping conditional-token ERC-1155 assets against an ERC-20 collateral asset.

Read that twice, because the half people assume is public is the half that is not. **The order
book is off-chain.** Orders you placed, orders you cancelled, orders that never filled and the
depth you were quoting leave no chain record at all. What settles on chain is the executed swap,
plus the splits, merges and redemptions that move collateral in and out of positions. A wallet's
"activity" is therefore a log of executions and never a log of intentions — which is why no
dashboard here can tell you that an address tried to buy and missed.

What is indexable is what the contracts emit. Polymarket publishes
[the subgraph manifest](https://github.com/Polymarket/polymarket-subgraph) for indexing "on-chain
trade, volume, user, liquidity and market data", and every product in this category is reading the
same events off the same chain. Differences between two dashboards are differences in aggregation,
not in access — [Dune dashboards](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/dune-polymarket-dashboards) and
[OrcaLayer](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/orcalayer) see the same fills and disagree about what to call them.

### And why it is not visible on a regulated exchange

A designated contract market publishes statistics, not accounts.
[17 CFR 16.01](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2025-title17-vol1/xml/CFR-2025-title17-vol1-sec16-01.xml)
requires each reporting market to record and publish, for each business day, gross open contracts
and total volume of trading by commodity and expiration, together with opening, closing and
settlement prices. Nothing in it is per account.

The per-account layer exists, and it has a different destination.
[17 CFR 17.00](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2025-title17-vol1/xml/CFR-2025-title17-vol1-sec17-00.xml)
provides that "each futures commission merchant, clearing member and foreign broker shall submit a
report to the Commission for each business day" covering the special accounts it carries. To the
Commission. Not to a dashboard, and not to you.

That is the whole reason [Kalshi](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/kalshi) and [Polymarket US](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-us) have no
wallet trackers. Their public surfaces are generous about markets and silent about accounts: the
[Kalshi API](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/kalshi-api) serves series, markets, order books, trades and candlesticks
unauthenticated, while positions, fills and settlements sit behind your own credentials and are
your own. Polymarket US serves markets, books and prices from a keyless public gateway, and gates
everything about an account behind identity verification.

**So when a product advertises wallet features on a regulated venue, it means one of three other
things:** aggregate market flow, your own authenticated account, or the Polymarket half of a
cross-venue product. Which one it is is a question the product can answer in a sentence, and the
[cross-venue data comparison](https://predictionmarkets.tools/compare/cross-venue-prediction-market-data) is the short version of
how far the asymmetry goes.

### What a "wallet" is, and how many of them one person is

Polymarket's archived v1 reference client spells the split out in its own configuration. The
[README](https://github.com/Polymarket/clob-client) — which now opens with "This repository has
been archived and is no longer maintained" — documents `funder` as "This is your Polymarket Profile
Address, where you send UDSC to" and `signer` as "This is your Private Key", alongside a numeric
signature type where 0 is a browser wallet and 1 is Magic or email login. Two addresses, one
trader, written into the client's first example.

The split survived the rewrite and got deeper. The current arrangement is a per-user deposit
wallet — Polymarket signature type 3 — deployed gaslessly through a relayer that pays the gas,
and a bare externally-owned account cannot trade on the v2 book at all; the
[Polymarket alpha bot](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-alpha-bot) card documents that from the other side,
because it has to deploy one for you before it can trade.

The general mechanism is a standard.
[ERC-1271](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1271), Final since 2018, exists because "Externally
Owned Accounts (EOA) can sign messages with their associated private keys, but currently contracts
cannot", and it lets a contract validate signatures itself on the rule that "a signed action
message is only valid when the signer is authorized to perform a given action on the behalf of a
smart wallet". The acting address and the authorising key are different objects by design, the
mapping between them is whatever the contract says it is, and it is nowhere published as a
directory.

Four things follow, and each of them breaks a statistic:

- **One person, several rows.** Splitting size across addresses, or keeping strategies apart, is
  ordinary and costs nothing. Each address ranks separately with its own record.
- **One row, several people.** A fund, a shared account, or a copy-trading bot placing orders for
  subscribers all print as a single address. The Copy Trade tab on
  [Polymarket Analytics](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-analytics) is a Telegram bot that generates a wallet for
  you and charges 1% on every transaction, buys and sells alike — every subscriber's trade lands in
  one row.
- **The signer is not evidence of the decider.** A session key, a delegated signer or a relayer
  means the key that signed the order may belong to software, not to whoever chose the position.
- **The population is not clean.** OrcaLayer's April 2026 audit of 470 million trades reports that
  six in ten wallets with apparently flawless records were airdrop farmers. Its published rules
  classify a farmer numerically — an average buy price above 95 cents — and a bot at more than
  500,000 trades averaging under 20 dollars, and it strips four Polymarket protocol router
  contracts platform-wide.

## Why a leaderboard's profit is not a measurement of skill

**The denominator is missing from the screen.** OrcaLayer publishes three populations behind three
pages: roughly 3.1 million wallets with at least one fill, 1.85 million clearing ten fills and 100
dollars of notional, and a narrower set with at least ten resolved markets that the smart-money
rankings actually use. A top-50 table drawn from three million accounts is the right tail of a
distribution that would have a right tail if every position were decided by a coin.

**Sample size and concentration are separate problems, and one number hides both.** A win rate
counts resolved positions without weighting them, so an account can be right nine times in ten and
be down; a profit figure can be one correct large position and forty small mistakes.
[Convexly](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/convexly) composites three pillars into its Edge Score — a baseline-adjusted
Brier score, the concentration of profit and loss, and the count of resolved positions — against a
frozen 8,656-wallet reference cohort, precisely because the headline figure does not survive the
other two.

**The arithmetic is not shared, and nobody has to say which they used.** Realised profit and an
unrealised mark are different claims. Lot matching may be FIFO or something else. Multi-outcome
markets need a correction that not every indexer applies. And splitting, merging or redeeming
conditional tokens moves value in and out of a position with no trade to attribute it to, so a
pipeline that only watches fills will misprice an address that uses them. Two dashboards reporting
"P&L" for one address are answering two questions.

**Completeness is a number almost nobody prints.** Convexly marks every row as coming either from a
full read rebuilt from the settlement record, block-anchored, or from a recent-trade window that
omits positions already redeemed — and its board of 12 September 2026 had 31 of its 42 wallets read
in full, with the ratio on the page rather than implied away. A census it generated on 22 August
2026 excludes a further 100 full reads that did not finish. That is what a measured figure looks
like next to an unmeasured one.

**The most useful evidence here is a vendor's own negative result.** A July 2026 Convexly note
points its skill-versus-luck filter at Convexly's own published top-50 leaderboard and reports that
zero of the 35 readable wallets clear its own bar. A leaderboard and a skill claim are not the same
object, and the clearest demonstration of that came from somebody who publishes both.

**And the book you can see is not the book.** [Airavat](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/airavat) scores wallets on one
venue's public record; a trader hedging on an exchange the indexer does not cover, or running a
second address, is scored on a fraction of their position and the score does not say so. Whether
the price itself means what it looks like is a separate question, answered in
[where the liquidity comes from](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/where-liquidity-comes-from).

## What "insider" means here, and what it does not

This is the claim that sells the category, and it is the one with the least behind it.

**What a product computes is narrow and checkable.** An address established a position of a stated
size at a stated time, and the price later moved. Every element of that is on the chain and can be
re-derived by anyone with a Polygon archive node.

**What does not follow from it:** who the address belongs to, whether it is one person or several,
what that person knew, when they knew it, or whether any rule applied to them. None of those are in
the data, and no amount of flow analysis puts them there.

**Nothing in the category closes the gap.** The three things that would make the label testable are
the rule, the false-positive rate, and a retrospective over addresses flagged *before* the outcome
was known. [Polysights](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polysights) ships the claim as a screen called Insider Finder with
none of the three published, and its own terms and privacy pages still read "Under Construction".
[Predicts.guru](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/predicts-guru) is more careful — its methodology notes warn that no single
metric tells the full story and that some public profiles may be incomplete — and it still ranks by
address, because address is all there is.

**The law is narrower than the label, and it is worth reading rather than assuming.**
[17 CFR 180.1](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2025-title17-vol2/xml/CFR-2025-title17-vol2-sec180-1.xml)
prohibits manipulative devices, untrue or misleading statements of material fact, and acts
operating as a fraud or deceit, in each case intentionally or recklessly. Its paragraph (b) reads,
verbatim: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to require any person to disclose to another
person nonpublic information that may be material to the market price, rate, or level of the
commodity transaction, except as necessary to make any statement made to the other person in or in
connection with the transaction not misleading in any material respect." Being better informed than
the other side is not, by itself, the thing that rule reaches.

**Where a genuine restriction exists, it is written down and it names categories of person.**
Series-level contract terms filed with the CFTC carry additional prohibitions on who may trade a
particular series — employees of the source agency, holders of material non-public information —
and they are readable per series, before you take a position, through the
[Kalshi API](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/kalshi-api). A prohibition in a filing is a document you can check. A badge on
a dashboard is a classifier you cannot.

**The classifiers themselves show how far off the label can land.** OrcaLayer removed four
Polymarket protocol router contracts platform-wide after one of them surfaced through its own
pipeline as an apparent insider. A router contract is not a person and knew nothing; it cleared the
bar anyway, which is the most concrete published account in this catalogue of what a false positive
looks like.

So the sentence the record supports is: *this account established this position at this time, ahead
of this move, on this venue.* Anything beyond it is the reader's inference, and it is an inference
about a human being — which is why this site writes the first sentence and not the second.

## Latency, and the difference between a signal and a fact

Three clocks run through this category, and a screen that mixes them is not lying to you, it is
showing you a pipeline.

**Before confirmation.** A transaction, in Ethereum's own developer documentation, "is then
[broadcasted to the network](https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/transactions/) and added to a
transaction pool consisting of all other pending network transactions", from which validators
select what to include. Pending means broadcast, and broadcast means intent.
[Predexon](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/predexon) sells exactly this as a channel — Polymarket fills seen in the Polygon
mempool, which it describes as three to five seconds ahead of confirmation — and its own
documentation says the quiet part: a mempool observation is not a trade, some never confirm, and
anything built on the feed needs an explicit reconciliation path for the ones that do not.

**At confirmation.** The fill is in a block and the chain is the record. This is the only one of the
three that is a fact.

**At index.** Every dashboard is behind the chain by its own amount, and the amounts are not
comparable. OrcaLayer states 15 to 20 seconds as its own figure rather than as a commitment. Dune
dashboards are batch-indexed and run minutes to hours behind. [PolyWallet](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polywallet)
states its refresh interval three incompatible ways on a single page. And
[Brier.fyi](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/brier-fyi) still says on its about page that its downloader runs nightly, while
its repository records the pipeline being paused on 23 January 2026 and nothing after the 24th — a
stale chart is indistinguishable from a fresh one, and no product in this category displays its own
staleness by default.

## What it costs

Reading is mostly free. Reading *reliably*, and being allowed to do anything with what you read,
is where the money is.

- **Free, with no account:** [Predicts.guru](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/predicts-guru) runs the wallet checker,
  leaderboards, event analytics and the activity feed without registration; public Dune dashboards
  cost nothing to open; OrcaLayer gives five wallet lookups a day without an account and 20 with
  one.
- **[OrcaLayer](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/orcalayer):** Pro at 9.99 USD a month lifts the lookup cap and adds alerts,
  a 25-wallet watchlist and CSV export; Premium at 19.99 USD a month is the developer tier, with
  REST at 600 requests a minute and a server-sent trade stream.
- **[Convexly](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/convexly)** meters the thing that actually costs, which is re-reading a
  wallet's full record on a schedule: Watchlist at 9 USD a month covers three wallets re-read every
  30 days, Researcher at 49 USD covers ten on the same cadence, Trader at 499 USD covers fifty
  re-read every seven days. A single reconciled read of one named wallet is 19 USD once, delivered
  with the block it was reconciled at and the command that re-derives it.
- **[Predexon](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/predexon)** prices the raw material instead: Free, Dev at 49, Pro at 249 and
  Enterprise from 499 USD a month for request quota, with tick history billed separately per GiB of
  compressed Parquet downloaded — 40 USD for Polymarket, 80 USD for Kalshi.

**The licence is the cost nobody budgets for.** OrcaLayer's terms forbid reselling without written
permission and forbid using the data to train, fine-tune or evaluate machine-learning models,
commercially or otherwise. Convexly's self-serve licence is one named individual and forbids
displaying, embedding or republishing output to third parties, your own clients included, without a
separate agreement. Dune is internal use only below Enterprise, scheduled queries expire after
three months on the Analyst plan, and the free plan cannot schedule at all. Polymarket Analytics
licenses its free data for individual, non-commercial use and prohibits scraping. A research
workflow that quietly becomes a product is a licence problem before it is a data problem.

**And the cost of acting on a wallet is not a subscription.** [Polyrama](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polyrama)'s own
terms say the copied wallet is an unrelated third party it does not vet, endorse or control, that
past performance says nothing about the future, and that no cap or safeguard is promised to prevent
loss. On top of that sit the fees on both legs of every mirrored position —
[what a trade actually costs](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/what-a-trade-actually-costs) — and the resolution risk of
every market you inherit, which is [who decides the outcome](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/who-decides-the-outcome).

## What you can do about it

**Put four questions to any product in this category.** Each has a short answer if the vendor has
done the work, and an evasive one if they have not.

1. *On which venue is this possible at all, and which half of your product am I looking at?* If the
   answer covers a regulated exchange, ask whether it is aggregate market flow or my own
   authenticated account, because 17 CFR 17.00 sends the per-account data somewhere I am not.
2. *Is the methodology published, and what counts as one wallet?* Specifically: do you merge a
   deposit wallet with its signer, do you exclude router and protocol contracts, and how do you
   classify farming and bot activity? OrcaLayer answers this in numbers. Most do not answer it at
   all.
3. *What is the false-positive rate on the label, and is there a retrospective?* A flag applied to
   settled history is a description. A flag applied before the outcome, scored afterwards, is a
   claim. Ask which one I am buying.
4. *Which clock is this screen on, and when did this number last move?* Mempool, confirmed or
   indexed — and if the pipeline stopped, does anything on the page say so?

**Then check the cheap things yourself, for nothing.**

- **Read one address on two products.** Take a single Polygon address, pick the same window, and
  compare the profit figures on [Predicts.guru](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/predicts-guru) and a public
  [Dune dashboard](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/dune-polymarket-dashboards). Where they differ, you have found the
  accounting assumption neither of them printed.
- **Change the window and watch the table change.** Twenty-four hours, thirty days and all-time
  produce three different top tens from the same events. If a ranking's story survives only one
  window, it was a property of the window.
- **Look for a completeness ratio before you look at a rank.** Convexly prints how many wallets on
  a board were read in full. Nobody else does, so on every other product the honest reading of a
  rank is "incomplete by an unstated amount".
- **Date the product, not just the data.** Open the changelog, the repository and the terms. A
  dashboard whose pipeline paused eight months ago still renders, still sorts and still looks
  current.
- **On a regulated venue, read the filing instead of the flow.** The contract terms for a series
  name who is prohibited from trading it, and they are published before the market opens. That is
  the only document in this whole subject that says anything checkable about who should not be in
  a market.

**Then size the position on what the record actually supports.** An address's history is evidence
that an account has a record on one venue over one window. It is not evidence of a person, a skill
or a source. The [analytics and dashboards](https://predictionmarkets.tools/categories/analytics-dashboards) listing carries what
each product reads and what it cannot see, which is the fastest way to find out whether the screen
in front of you is reading a chain or reading a model.

## Tools this bears on

- [Polysights](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polysights.md) — Polymarket wallet tracking and an insider finder, with the trading terminal behind a code.
- [Predicts.guru](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/predicts-guru.md) — Free Polymarket wallet checker, leaderboards and event analytics, no signup.
- [OrcaLayer](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/orcalayer.md) — Polymarket whale analytics indexed from Polygon, with a published farmer filter.
- [Convexly](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/convexly.md) — Polymarket wallet diagnostics with published methods, intervals and failed tests.
- [Predexon](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/predexon.md) — Tick-level book history as Parquet, billed by the gigabyte, plus a mempool-aware feed.

## FAQ

### Can I track wallets on Kalshi or Polymarket US the way I can on Polymarket?

No, and not because nobody has built it. A CFTC-regulated market publishes market statistics under 17 CFR 16.01 — volume, open contracts, prices — while the per-account position reports required by 17 CFR 17.00 are submitted to the Commission, not to the public. There is no public per-account ledger for a product to index. A tool advertising wallet features on a regulated venue is showing aggregate market flow, or your own authenticated account.

### Does a wallet correspond to a person?

Not reliably, in either direction. One trader can run several addresses deliberately, and Polymarket's own design separates the address that holds funds from the key that signs. One address can equally serve many people — a fund, a shared account, or a copy-trading bot placing orders for its subscribers. Read a row as an account with a record on one venue over one window.

### What does an insider label on a dashboard actually mean?

That a vendor's classifier matched an address against a pattern it has not published. What the chain supports is narrow: this address established this position at this size and this time, and the price later moved. Who the address belongs to, what they knew, and whether any rule applied to them are not in the data. No product in this category publishes its rule, its false-positive rate or a retrospective over addresses it flagged in advance.

### Is trading while better informed against the rules?

That question is answered by a named document, not by a dashboard. 17 CFR 180.1 is a fraud-based prohibition, and its paragraph (b) states that nothing in the section requires a person to disclose nonpublic information material to the price. Real restrictions do exist, and they are written per series in the contract terms filed with the CFTC, naming categories such as source-agency employees. Read the filing, not the badge.

### Why do two dashboards report different profit for the same address?

Because they are computing different things from the same events. Realised profit and an unrealised mark are not the same number; lot matching may be FIFO or something else; multi-outcome markets need a correction that not everyone applies; and splitting, merging or redeeming conditional tokens moves value without a trade to attribute it to. Neither figure is wrong, and they will not agree.

## Sources

1. [ERC-1271, Standard Signature Validation Method for Contracts](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1271) — Ethereum Improvement Proposals, 2018-07-25. An ERC at Final status is frozen rather than revised, and this is the interface smart-contract wallets still implement.
2. [Polymarket CTF Exchange, repository README](https://github.com/Polymarket/ctf-exchange) — Polymarket, read 2026-09-21
3. [Polymarket CLOB Client, repository README (archived)](https://github.com/Polymarket/clob-client) — Polymarket, read 2026-09-21
4. [Polymarket Subgraph, repository README](https://github.com/Polymarket/polymarket-subgraph) — Polymarket, read 2026-09-21
5. [17 CFR 16.01, Publication of market statistics](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2025-title17-vol1/xml/CFR-2025-title17-vol1-sec16-01.xml) — U.S. Government Publishing Office, Code of Federal Regulations, 2025-04-01
6. [17 CFR 17.00, Information to be furnished by futures commission merchants, clearing members and foreign brokers](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2025-title17-vol1/xml/CFR-2025-title17-vol1-sec17-00.xml) — U.S. Government Publishing Office, Code of Federal Regulations, 2025-04-01
7. [17 CFR 180.1, Prohibition on manipulative and deceptive devices](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2025-title17-vol2/xml/CFR-2025-title17-vol2-sec180-1.xml) — U.S. Government Publishing Office, Code of Federal Regulations, 2025-04-01
8. [Transactions, Ethereum developer documentation](https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/transactions/) — ethereum.org, read 2026-09-21

*Last updated 2026-09-21. A reference page, corrected in place — not a dated post.*