A single wealthy supporter of former President Donald Trump is suspected of pouring some $30 million into a cryptocurrency betting website — and dramatically shifting the odds in favor of his recapturing the White House.
The online bets were reportedly placed over the past two weeks by four anonymous accounts on Polymarket, which is funded by investors including billionaire Republican megadonor Peter Thiel.
The flurry of wagers increased the odds of Trump beating Vice President Kamala Harris to 60 percent from a dead heat at the start of the month, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The figures run markedly counter to recent polls that show the national race and those in seven swing states within the margins of error, meaning the contest is a statistical tie.
Most of the mystery Polymarket bets are staked on a straight Trump victory, but the four accounts have also placed millions of dollars in side bets that he'll win swing states and the popular vote, according to the Journal.
The blockchain analysis company Arkham Intelligence examined the four Polymarket accounts that bet big on Trump and found similarities in their activity, including systematically placing wagers and increasing them at the same time, CEO Miguel Morel told the Journal.
"There's strong reason to believe they are the same entity," Morel said.
The Polymarket wagers also shifted the odds in other betting markets, the Journal said, and billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk touted the movement earlier this month.
"Trump now leading Kamala by 3 percent in betting markets. More accurate than polls, as actual money is on the line," Musk said Oct. 6 on his social media website X.
Despite what Musk contends, polls and betting markets are very different animals. Surveys are intended to determine the opinions of a group of people representative of the country; that's not the intent of betting markets, which raises issues of gender and wealth disparities.
Polymarket has hired outside experts to investigate the activity in its presidential election markets, the Journal said, citing an unidentified person familiar with the matter.
The website bills itself as the "world's biggest prediction market" and enables users to wager so-called stablecoins pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar on everything from interest rates to movie box office receipts.
In May, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan told the CoinDesk website that the company had raised $45 billion in series B funding round led by Thiel's Founders Fund.
Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, backed Trump in 2016, when he donated $1.25 million to support the campaign, spoke at the Republican National Convention and served on the transition team.
Thiel also spent a record $15 million on the winning 2022 Senate campaign of Trump running mate JD Vance, a former employee of Thiel's Mithril Capital venture capital company.
Last year, Thiel told the Atlantic that he turned down a Trump request for $10 million and would likely sit out the 2024 presidential election.
But shortly before this year's GOP convention, Thiel called Trump to encourage him to pick Vance and casually mentioned that he had given millions of dollars to a pro-Trump legal group, the New York Times reported Friday.
Democratic political strategist Tom Bonier, a senior adviser at the TargetSmart research company, told Fortune he believed the Polymarket bets on Trump were part of a "coordinated effort to change the perception of this race."
A "central argument has emerged in the closing weeks of this campaign: strength versus weakness," Bonier said. "Donald Trump's persona, and therefore his support from voters, relies on being seen as strong. But if the public perception is that he will lose, that all falls apart."
Veteran crypto investor Adam Cochran, who describes himself as a right-of-center Harris supporter, also said the bets placed on Trump appeared to be intended to generate a sense of momentum for the Republican nominee.
If Trump were to lose, the betting market could also bolster claims that the election was stolen from him, Cochran, managing partner of the venture capital company Cinneamhain Ventures, told the Journal.
"It is by far the most efficient political advertising one can buy," Cochran said.
Another Democratic strategist, Simon Rosenberg, on Wednesday dismissed the odds created by Polymarket as "voodoo" and said the site "could be manipulated by wealthy people," including foreign adversaries of the U.S., according to the Daily Beast.
"The idea that we're supposed to take all of that seriously — and this has some kind of relevance to our election — it's so bonkers," he told "MeidasTouch" host Ben Meiselas on YouTube.
Some experts said the recent bets on Trump may be just an attempt by a deep-pocketed gambler to cash in on an anticipated victory by the former president.
"Purchasing a large number of shares on one outcome does not require any ulterior motive or effort to manipulate the market," Rutgers University statistics professor Harry Crane told the Journal.
Barnard College economics professor Rajiv Sethi, who co-wrote a paper on someone who lost nearly $7 million by betting on Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, also said the potential of a big payday was the simplest explanation for the $30 million in wagers.
But, Sethi told the Journal: "If I were trying to manipulate a market, this is exactly how I would do it."
