How many Polymarket wallets are in profit — and why 16% and 30% are both in the literature

Two percentages circulate as if they were the same fact.

One is 15.9% in realized profit / 84.1% in the red, from Andrey Sergeenkov, across about 2.5 million addresses, with data through 1 April 2026. The other is about 30%, from a December 2025 DeFi Oasis cashflow cut (about 1.7 million addresses, as reported by CryptoNews) and, separately, from a May 2026 author note on a Reichenbach & Walther update (“roughly 30% of traders make profits,” on a dataset the author describes as about 500 million on-chain trades and 2 million traders).

Those numbers can sit in the same literature without one of them being a lie. They are not a recency-filtered rate for people who traded this week. That rate is UNKNOWN. No source opened for this piece defines “active” by a 7-day or 30-day window and publishes the share of those wallets that are in profit.

What this page does not claim. It does not claim that X% of active traders are profitable. It does not say 99% lose. It does not collapse Sergeenkov’s ladder into a single “meaningfully profitable” percentage. It does not tell you how to join the 15.9%, the 2%, or the 840 addresses. It does not claim the April 2026 tape still looks like this on 14 August 2026. Complementary-price gaps, and the named wallets a 2024–25 paper classified as extracting them, are separate pieces.

What 15.9% is counting

Sergeenkov’s unit is an address with on-chain Polymarket USDC flows — buys and sells (OrderFilled), redemptions (PayoutRedemption), plus splits and merges (PositionsSplit, PositionsMerge) — minus ten system addresses. He says so in the methodology, even though the headline says “traders.”

He counts realized PnL only. Tokens still sitting on an unresolved market look like cash that left. He writes that he checked 96% of trading volume was on already-resolved markets. That is his check, as of 1 April 2026, not a live recompute.

He also writes that every number is an address, not necessarily a person. One desk can look like many winners or many losers. One person who switches wallets can look like two short streaks instead of one long one.

Safe sentence, if you need one on air:

In the best public all-address realized-PnL study we have (Sergeenkov, data through 1 April 2026), 15.9% of about 2.5 million addresses were in realized profit. That is not a recency-filtered “active trader” rate.

Do not upgrade that to “16% of active Polymarket traders are profitable.” The 0.1-point rounding to “16%” is Sergeenkov’s own, in the methodology, when he compares himself to DeFi Oasis. The precise published headline pair is 15.9 / 84.1.

Why ~30% is also in the literature

Sergeenkov compares himself to DeFi Oasis and names the gap. DeFi Oasis, in December 2025, showed 30% of 1.7 million addresses in profit. Sergeenkov got 16%. Both sides, he says, use incoming minus outgoing USDC. He includes splits and merges; DeFi Oasis, in his account, did not. “When splits are left out, an address looks more profitable because one category of expenses is simply invisible.” The address base also grew from 1.7 million to 2.5 million in the three months between the studies.

CryptoNews, last updated 29 December 2025, restates the DeFi Oasis cut as about 70% realized losses and 30% realized profit among more than 1.7 million addresses, and quotes the 29 December 2025 defioasis.eth post. The method it attributes: sale proceeds plus redemptions minus purchases, excluding unrealized PnL. The original Dune dashboard (dune.com/defioasis/polymarket-pnl) returned 404 on 15 August 2026, 00:37 UTC (14 Aug 2026, 8:37 PM ET). Treat the 30% as attributed secondary, not as a dashboard we re-ran.

A third ~30% is not DeFi Oasis. On a public LinkedIn post opened this run (page displayed “2mo”; treated as 26 May 2026), Martin Walther wrote that a major update of the Reichenbach & Walther Polymarket study still found: “Only roughly 30% of traders make profits. This fraction has stabilized in the last couple of months.” He describes the dataset as nearly half a billion on-chain trades and about 2 million traders. The SSRN PDF was not opened for this piece. We do not have their PnL formula from primary pages. “Active” is not defined in the post. So this 30% is an author statement, not a table we read.

INFERENCE, labeled as such: the 15.9% vs DeFi Oasis ~30% gap is a measurement choice (splits/merges) plus a later, larger address base. It is not evidence of two different “active trader” populations. The Reichenbach/Walther 30% is a separate study whose formula we have not opened.

“Meaningful” is not a second percentage you can quote

No opened source defines “meaningfully profitable” as an official standard. Sergeenkov uses the word. He writes that “the gap between any profit and meaningful profits is so large” that he charts on a log scale. That is his language.

If you need a ladder, use his, with the date on it. Data through 1 April 2026, about 2.5 million addresses:

• Realized PnL above $0: 15.9%
• Lifetime above $1,000: 2%
• Lifetime above $10,000: 0.32%, roughly 8,000 addresses
• Lifetime above $100,000: 840 addresses, 0.033%
• Average monthly profit above $1,000: 1.25%
• Average monthly above $5,000: 0.26%, about 6,600 addresses
• Average monthly above $10,000: 0.13%, roughly 3,250 addresses

Among those about 6,600 addresses with average monthly profit above $5,000, he writes that 53% earned that average in a single month, 73% were active no more than two months, and 172 addresses — 2.6% of that subset — were active more than a year.

On a different cut, still his: in any single month, 0.98% of all addresses earned more than $5,000; two months in a row 0.1%; three 0.03%; four 0.015%.

None of those rungs is “the” meaningful rate. Collapsing them to “only 2% are really profitable” drops the threshold and the date. Do not do that.

Profits are concentrated. That is a different claim.

A CEPR discussion-paper abstract (Akey, Grégoire, Harvie, Martineau; published 12 June 2026) does not give a loss-rate percentage. It does say this, on 588 million trades and $67 billion in volume: the top 1% of users with positive PnL capture 76.5% of profits.

Read the denominator. That is the top 1% of users who already have positive PnL, not the top 1% of all users.

The same abstract says successful traders provide liquidity with limit orders that resolve favorably, and unsuccessful traders take with market orders; that monthly performance is “modestly persistent,” which “may represent sample selection rather than skill”; and that insider trading is unlikely to explain the largest winners. The full PDF was not opened. Extra percentages attributed to this paper on blogs — including a “69% lost” line — are UNKNOWN from primary and are not used here.

DeFi Oasis, via CryptoNews, also describes a thin top tail. Those extra rungs ($3.7 billion, 668 addresses above $1 million, and so on) were not recomputed here, and the dashboard 404s. If they appear at all, they appear as CryptoNews’s attribution of a December 2025 tweet, not as our count.

What this page is not saying

It is not saying that X% of active traders are profitable. That figure was not in any source we could re-open.

It is not saying that 99% lose. That is someone else’s headline, not Sergeenkov’s 84.1%.

It is not a list of ways to join the 15.9%, the 2%, or the 840 addresses. Those are historical, realized, address-level counts with a stated cutoff. They are not a map.

It is not a claim that the April 2026 tape still looks like this on 14 August 2026. We did not rerun the query.

If you came here because two blog posts disagreed, the useful move is smaller than picking a side: name the unit, name the cutoff, name whether splits and merges are in the cashflow, and refuse to say “active” unless the source did.