The dormant wallet that wakes up
A wallet that traded, went silent for months, then returns with one large bet. Past its 30-trade gate it is still positive — but not by more than luck could produce.
The hypothesisThe fresh-wallet "insider" signal failed because it can't separate informed money from loud money. Add a costly-to-fake filter: a wallet with real history that went dormant for months and returns with one large, focused bet. Random gamblers don't hibernate; people who learn something specific do.
The test
Each large bet in the whale feed triggers a dormancy measurement via the bettor's full public activity history — how long since this wallet last did anything, excluding the current burst? Wake-ups from ≥90 days of silence with a sanely-priced book become would-enter signals, logged at the live executable ask and settled at resolution. Paper only, by policy: its parent signal burned five thousand paper copies proving that plausible insider signatures usually aren't.
The result
Past the gate, and less convincing than it looked at 28. Seventy signals have settled: 40 won, +16.8% ROI at the logged asks. Counting one position per market, that is 32 wins in 53 markets (60.4%) at an average price of 57¢, which implied about 57% — +13.2%. The luck test cannot separate that from chance: the win count sits about 0.6 standard errors above what the prices implied. A few cheap winners did most of the work; without the three best signals the per-signal average is −6.7%.
By month, one position per market: June +38.8% (9 markets), July +15.0% (10), August +18.4% (7), September −3.8% (14), October +9.7% (13). Positive in four of five months, but the gains since September are much smaller than the early run — the same shape as the listing-fade lane next door, which sat at +53.6% at 29 settlements and finished at −15.2% by 289.
Conclusion
Still open, and unproven. The signal reached its pre-registered sample size, but reaching the sample size is not the same as passing the luck test, and it has not passed. It stays a paper probe: a positive average carried by a few longshots is the most common way a strategy fools the person running it. It needs a much larger sample, or a clearer win rate, before any money goes near it.