Polymarket paid its top traders $6.4M in rebates last month. The leaderboard shows none of it

The short answer

Polymarket pays its busiest traders three ways the profit leaderboard never shows: maker rebates, liquidity rewards and, since June, rebates on taker fees. We pulled every one of those payouts, from the first to October 31, 2026, for the 521 wallets that have made the top 100 of any of Polymarket's four profit boards.

• $6.37M in 30 days, on top of the $73.9M those wallets made on the leaderboard. Taker-fee rebates were $3.89M of it.
• Ten wallets took 46%. One sports bot alone got $600K, all of it back from taker fees.
• Losing doesn't stop the payments. 50 wallets that lost money in the month were paid $1.31M. Only two of them ended up ahead.
• Volume buys a discount. At the top tier a taker pays half the posted fee. That is why the same bot makes less on a small new account.

What Polymarket pays, and why the leaderboard misses it

All three are paid once a day as separate transfers into the wallet, and none of them is a trade. The leaderboard, as far as we can tell, only adds up trades. We tested that on the three wallets whose whole history is a handful of positions, where every dollar can be accounted for:

• frostrizz: leaderboard profit $8,801,837.99. Its six closed positions sum to $8,801,837.99. It has also received $36.2K in rebates and rewards.
• bareflux: $2,604,178.93 on the leaderboard, $2,604,178.93 across nine positions, and $78.3K in rebates and rewards on top.
• 00gringo00: $3,506,887.74 on the leaderboard. Seven closed positions and one open position come to exactly that, and $46.0K in rebates and rewards come on top.

Polymarket's analytics docs only describe leaderboard profit as "PnL in USD for the selected window". The three wallets above show that it doesn't include rebates.

Who got the $6.4M

340 of the 521 wallets received something in the 30 days. The median one got $3,520. 92 got $10,000 or more, and 14 got more than $100,000. The money is concentrated: the top wallet took 9.4% of the total, the top ten 45.7%, the top fifty 78.3%.

Almost all of the top ten trade mostly sports. That makes sense: sports carries the lowest maker share (15%) but the most volume, and a sports bot can rack up taker volume all day. Market makers here collect from all three programs at once. They rest orders, so they earn maker rebates and rewards. They also take liquidity at times, and those fills earn taker-fee rebates too. RN1, for example, got $144.8K in maker rebates, $41.3K in rewards and $78.4K back from taker fees.

By kind of trader

We sort wallets the same way as in our check of who the top traders are: market makers, minute-market bots in the 5- and 15-minute crypto windows, fast takers, and human-paced wallets. Among wallets still trading:

The median share is over profitable wallets only. Bot-like wallets got 90% of the money, the same split our earlier 90-day count found.

Minute-market bots get the least in dollars and depend on it the most. Their profit is made in small pieces, and rebates add a median 10% on top. Liquidity rewards barely reach them: the reward program for the crypto windows ran in August and has ended.

The human-paced 10% goes mostly to people who trade big. joseph00677 fills about eight times a day and got $93.5K back in taker-fee rebates. The tier counts dollars, not fills.

Paid to lose

Rebates follow volume, not results. 50 wallets that lost money on the leaderboard over the 30 days were still paid $1.31M, against $11.9M in combined losses.

• 0x2c33…0563, a sports market maker, lost $2.05M and received $355.2K.
• mooseborzoii lost $927.4K and received $183.1K.
• totoro3miyazaki, human-paced at about ten fills a day, lost $1.44M and got $27.5K back from taker fees.

Only two wallets were turned from a loss into a profit. ferrariChampions2026 lost $341.9K on the leaderboard and received $367.3K, so it ended up about $25K ahead. underperformingforaliving lost $23.0K and received $33.9K. For everyone else a rebate softens a loss but doesn't cancel it. At the top tier it gives back half the fee, and none of the price.

When rebates are most of the profit

Seven wallets made money on the leaderboard over the 30 days, received at least $10,000 in rebates and rewards, and got more from the rebates than from trading:

For these, the trading is close to break-even and the program is the business. A leaderboard screenshot of any of them shows less than half of what the wallet actually made.

The tier ladder

The taker-fee rebate is where volume pays most. Polymarket ranks every account by its weighted volume over the last 30 days: trade size × (1 − price) × a category weight. Crypto weighs 2.3, economics, culture and weather 1.7, politics, finance and tech 1.3, sports 1.0. Only taker trades that pay a fee count.

For a crypto taker buying at 50¢, every $1 traded is $1.15 of weighted volume. The posted fee on a $100 buy at 50¢ is $3.50. Here is what that fee comes to at each tier:

A Diamond account pays $1.96 for a trade that costs a new account $3.50, and on a round trip the gap doubles. For a minute-market bot whose edge is a cent or two a share, that gap can decide whether it makes money at all. Our minute-markets guide explains why the fee at 50¢ matters so much there. Two more details from the rules: a new rate applies only to trades made after you reach the tier, and you drop a tier after a short grace period once your volume falls below it.

What this means for a bot you buy

Four sellers in our catalog run their bot on a public Polymarket account. All four trade the 5- and 15-minute crypto windows.

"Share of the total" is rebates divided by profit plus rebates. Roughly a third of what each account kept in October came from the programs, not from trading.

A rebate total also gives away the tier. In crypto, the fee is always 3.04% of weighted volume (the 0.07 fee rate over the 2.3 weight), whatever the price. norm1e69's $62.6K only works at Diamond: at 44% it implies about $142K in fees and $4.7M of weighted volume, which is inside Diamond's $4–10M band. No other rate gives a volume inside its own band. That matches the 44% the seller publishes. PolymTradeBot's account works out to Diamond the same way.

So picture a buyer who runs the same code at a tenth of the size. Their weighted volume would be around $470K a month, which is Gold. Gold pays 18% instead of 44%, and only from the day the account gets there. Per dollar of fees, the buyer gets back 41% of what the seller does, and in the first month less than that. The trading edge may well carry over. The rebate share of the seller's results won't. Ask any seller for their account's tier and its rebate history next to the profit chart. Our cost guide adds up the rest of what running a bot costs.

PolymTradeBot

Editor's Choice

Crypto Markets

Automated Python bot for Polymarket's 5- and 15-minute Bitcoin & Ethereum up/down markets. Trades live or in paper mode with configurable risk controls, self-hosted from full source.

Botone-time

GoodFallen

Editor's Choice

Crypto Markets

Self-hosted Python bot for Polymarket's 5- and 15-minute crypto Up or Down windows, sold as full source for $399 once and backed by the public Polymarket account its seller runs it on, @GoodFallen.

Botone-time

StepAhead

Editor's Choice

Crypto Markets

Self-hosted Python bot for Polymarket's 5- and 15-minute crypto Up or Down windows, sold as full source for $399 once, or for $899 with installation on your server and a private monitoring dashboard.

Botone-time

How the payouts grew

Monthly payouts to the 521 wallets:

Before 2026 these wallets got only liquidity rewards, up to about $150K a month, going back to November 2023. Maker rebates first appear in January. Taker-fee rebates started in late June, and in their first full month they became the largest of the three. The July peak lines up with the World Cup knockout rounds, the same peak our state-of-bots census found in builder volume. All-time, these 521 wallets have been paid $37.9M: $17.1M in taker-fee rebates, $13.2M in maker rebates and $7.7M in rewards.

Read the early months with care. The set is the wallets that reached a board by October 2026, so traders who were paid in March and have since stopped are underrepresented.

How to check any wallet's rebates

Every payout is public. In the Data API they are activity rows with no market attached, and one call lists them:

curl -s "https://data-api.polymarket.com/activity?user=0xWALLET&type=MAKER_REBATE,REWARD,TAKER_REBATE&limit=500"

Each row has a type, a timestamp and a usdcSize. For a longer history, page back by passing the oldest timestamp as end. Add up the last 30 days and set the total next to the wallet's 30-day leaderboard profit. Every wallet page under /wallets already shows its 90-day rebates and rewards.

What this means for you

• If you read a leaderboard screenshot: the profit shown leaves out rebates. For a bot it can understate what the account makes by a third or more. For a person it barely matters.
• If you buy a bot: ask for the account's tier and rebate history next to its profit. A record built at Diamond won't repeat at Bronze. Our scam red flags cover what else to ask.
• If you build one: resting orders pay you and taking costs you, less as you climb the tiers. The market-making guide covers the resting side and its inventory risk.
• If you copy wallets: a copier gets no share of the wallet's rebates and pays its own fees at its own tier. Our copy-trading study measured what is left.

Method

• Wallets. The 521 wallets we track: every wallet that has appeared in the top 100 of Polymarket's overall or Crypto profit leaderboard, all-time or 30-day, since October 11, 2026.
• Payouts. Every MAKER_REBATE, REWARD and TAKER_REBATE row in each wallet's activity on Polymarket's public Data API, all-time, paged by time. Polymarket pays shortly after midnight UTC for the previous day, so payouts dated October 2–31 cover October 1–30. All 521 wallets were pulled without errors.
• Profit. Each wallet's 30-day row on Polymarket's profit leaderboard, pulled in the same run. It is profit after fees and before rebates.
• Kinds. From our daily wallet measurement of October 29, 2026, with the rules described in are Polymarket's top traders bots?. Still trading means a fill in the last 14 days.
• Tiers and rates. From Polymarket's documentation on fees, maker rebates, liquidity rewards and taker rebates, read on October 31, 2026. Polymarket can change the rates at any time.
• Limits. These are payouts to wallets that made a board, not the platform total. A wallet's tier is not published in the API. The tiers we give for the sellers' accounts are worked out from their payouts and assume all their taker fees were in crypto.
• Script. scripts/rebates.mjs in our repository does the pull. It is plain Node with no keys.