Crypto Startup Bet on Its Own Fundraise on Polymarket, Then Apologized

P2P.me, a decentralized trading platform, disclosed Thursday that its team opened positions on Polymarket wagering on the outcome of its own capital raise, then issued a public apology after the trades surfaced on-chain. The team placed bets 10 days before the raise went live that the project would hit its $6 million fundraising target, using capital from the project’s foundation account under an account named “P2P Team.”

At the time the positions were opened, P2P.me said it had only one oral commitment from Multicoin Capital for $3 million, with no signed term sheets or guaranteed allocations. The raise ultimately closed at $5.2 million, missing the target, but the team still walked away with a profit: an initial outlay of $20,500 returned $35,212, netting roughly $14,700. All proceeds, the team said, will be directed to the project’s MetaDAO treasury.

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The disclosure is a textbook case of the conflict-of-interest problem that has dogged prediction markets as they scale into the mainstream. Trading on an outcome you can directly influence sits in a gray area that neither Polymarket’s current rules nor existing U.S. law cleanly addresses. P2P.me acknowledged as much, calling the failure to disclose upfront “a mistake we own” while arguing the outcome was genuinely uncertain at the time.

The timing makes the incident harder to dismiss as a one-off. Congress is actively moving on the issue: Representatives Adrian Smith and Nikki Budzinski introduced the PREDICT Act this week to ban lawmakers and senior officials from trading on prediction markets, and a separate bill targeting political insider trading landed a day later. Meanwhile, Polymarket itself recently partnered with Palantir to build a surveillance system for detecting manipulation. Whether self-policing will satisfy regulators, or whether incidents like this accelerate a heavier legislative hand, is the open question for the sector.