“Top 1% Polymarket market maker”: an accurate guide to liquidity rewards, with earnings nobody can check
An X article explains how Polymarket pays traders to leave orders in the book, and says its author is in the top 1% of reward earners. We checked the guide against Polymarket's documentation, and the earnings against the evidence offered for them.
The claim“Top 1% of wallets by net profit from that program on any 7-day window.” “Clean profit i'd actually stand behind - somewhere around $100-150 a day.” — X (@0xSurferX)
The short version
The article, “How i became top 1% Polymarket market maker (or how liquidity rewards actually work)”, was posted on X on October 4, 2026 and has been viewed about 36,800 times. It explains Polymarket's Liquidity Rewards program, which pays traders a share of a daily pool for keeping limit orders near the middle of a market's price, whether or not the orders fill. The author says the program put them in the top 1% of wallets by net profit from rewards. A post the day before, embedded in the article, says the bot only started paying consistently in mid-July, earns “around $100-150 a day” after costs, and reached $200–250 a day for one week in August. The article ends with an invitation to the author's “FREE ALPHA” Telegram channel, “limited to 10 spots/day”.
We checked ten statements about how the program works against Polymarket's own documentation. The scoring formula, the rule that the two sides of a quote are combined with a factor of 3, the rule that orders priced below 10¢ or above 90¢ must be two-sided to count, the once-a-minute sampling and the $1 minimum payout all match, and the worked examples are calculated correctly. One figure is wrong: the article says maker rebates reach “up to 50% in finance”; Polymarket's table gives finance 25%. Four statements are only partly right, and the one that matters most is privacy. The article says nobody can watch your wallet, because reward orders are “off-chain and private”. Nobody can see whose orders are resting, but every reward payout is public: Polymarket's activity feed lists each wallet's REWARD payments, with no login needed.
That makes the earnings claims easy to check, if there is a wallet to check. There isn't. The article and the post it embeds name no Polymarket account. The two Polymarket profiles named like the author belong to other people: one is linked to a different X account, and neither has traded more than $4,000. The one piece of evidence is a screenshot of a Polymarket “Daily Rewards” card reading $1,527, “Apr 29 Earnings”. By the author's own account, April 29 is about two and a half months before the bot started paying, and $1,527 is six to fifteen times the $100–250 a day the author claims. It may be from another year, another account, or another program, but it does not support the story told next to it. Polymarket also publishes no ranking by reward income (its leaderboards rank trading profit and volume, and leave rewards out), so “top 1%” is not a figure anyone outside the account can confirm.
The article's example market is a question about whether a Valorant player joins Gen.G in 2027. It pays $18 a day in rewards, has $58 resting in its book, and has traded $1,281 in two months. We pulled the public reward payouts of the 25 wallets that have traded or hold it. Eighteen have received rewards, and eight averaged more than $100 on the days they were paid, so $100–150 a day would not stand out even in this corner. The largest, “Dr.PNL”, has received $709,862 since September 2025, $192,877 of it in September 2026 alone. The article is right that fills are the danger. Dr.PNL is down $496,881 on trading, 70% of its reward income; the next largest earner gave back 50%. Eight of the twelve wallets that received at least $4,000 in rewards lost money on their trades. Our own simulated reward farmer learned the same lessons about churn and being picked off.
Verdict: as an explainer, the guide is fair, and better sourced than most posts of its kind. Its main factual error is the one that protects its author: reward income is public, so a wallet would settle the claim in minutes, and none is given. The earnings that make the author an authority are unproven, the one screenshot doesn't fit the author's own timeline, and the article ends in a Telegram channel that the article's own image shows with one subscriber.
Technical appendix
Exhibit A The guide's statements, checked against Polymarket's documentation
Sources: Polymarket's Liquidity Rewards and Maker Rebates pages (docs.polymarket.com) and Polymarket US's Liquidity Incentive Program page (docs.polymarket.us), read November 3, 2026.
| The article says | Polymarket's documentation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Resting orders near the midpoint earn a share of a daily pool, filled or not | Same | Matches |
| Each order scores ((v − s) / v)² × b, where v is the market's maximum distance from the midpoint and s is the order's distance | Same formula | Matches |
| With a 3¢ cutoff, an order 0.5¢ from the midpoint scores 0.69 per share and one 2.5¢ away scores 0.028, so the close order beats one ten times its size by more than double | Follows from the formula: 0.694 against 10 × 0.0278 = 0.278, 2.5 times | Calculated correctly |
| The two sides are combined as max(min(Q1, Q2), max(Q1/3, Q2/3)); below 10¢ or above 90¢, only the smaller side counts | Same, with c = 3.0 on all markets | Matches |
| Sides of 100 and 100 score 100; 200 and 100 score 100; 400 and 100 score 133 | Follows from the rule above | Calculated correctly |
| The book is sampled every minute; payouts land daily at midnight UTC, in pUSD, with a $1 minimum | Sampled once a minute at a random moment; paid daily at midnight UTC; $1 minimum. Every active pool we found lists bridged USDC (USDC.e) as its reward asset, not pUSD | Partly: the currency differs |
| Every cancel and repost “resets” the score | Each one-minute sample is scored on its own; no bonus builds up over time. The only cost of re-quoting is minutes with no order in the book, as the article itself goes on to say | Partly |
| Maker rebates are about 20% of taker fees in crypto, 25% in most categories, 15% in sports, “up to 50% in finance” | Crypto 20%, sports 15%, most categories 25%, finance 25%; geopolitics markets have no fees and pay no rebate | Wrong on finance |
| Reward orders are off-chain and private, so nobody can watch your wallet and copy your quotes | Orders rest off-chain and the public book shows prices and sizes, not owners. But each wallet's REWARD payouts appear in the public activity feed, and its fills are on-chain | Partly: quotes are hidden, income is not |
| Polymarket US scores orders by discount factor ^ (ticks from best price) × size, with the same strategy logic, including two-sidedness | The formula matches. But on Polymarket US you do not have to quote both sides yourself: where a market sets a maximum spread, it is the whole book that must be two-sided. Payouts arrive up to about seven business days after each period ends, not daily | Partly |
Count: five statements match exactly, four partly, one is wrong. The article's opinion that Polymarket would like makers to “net out around zero” is not something the documentation addresses, so it is not counted.
Exhibit B The earnings claims and the evidence offered
| Claim | Where | What we found |
|---|---|---|
| “Top 1% of wallets by net profit” from Liquidity Rewards, “on any 7-day window” | Article and the October 3 post it embeds | No wallet is named. Polymarket's public leaderboards rank trading profit and volume only; the profit figure leaves out rewards. No public ranking by reward income exists to place a wallet in a top 1% |
| Bot “didn't start printing consistently until mid-July” | October 3 post | Cannot be checked without a wallet |
| “Clean profit” of about $100–150 a day over roughly two months; $200–250 a day for one week in August | October 3 post | Cannot be checked without a wallet. “Clean” would mean rewards minus losses on filled orders, which only the account holder can calculate |
| Screenshot: Polymarket “Daily Rewards” card, $1,527, “Apr 29 Earnings” | Image in both posts, including the article's header | April 29 falls about 2½ months before the author says the bot started paying, and $1,527 is 6 to 15 times the author's stated daily earnings. The card shows no wallet or year |
| Author's Polymarket account | Not given | Polymarket profile search finds two accounts named like the author, “0xsurfe” and “Oxsurfer”. The first is linked to the X account @Airdropsurfe; the second has no X account. Lifetime volume: $3,518 and $625 |
Exhibit C Who earns rewards in the article's example market
The market: “Will primmie play for Gen.G Esports in 2027?”, created September 4, 2026. On November 3 its reward pool was $18 a day (orders of at least 20 shares within 4.5¢ of the midpoint), its book held $58, the best bid was 4.6¢ and the best ask 78.2¢, and it had traded $1,281 across 30 trades. We took every wallet in its trade history and its top holders, 26 in all, dropped one Polymarket contract address, and totalled each remaining wallet's REWARD payouts from Polymarket's public activity feed. Payouts are not tagged by market, so these are each wallet's rewards from all markets.
| Wallet (public name) | Rewards received | Days paid | Average per day paid | October 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dr.PNL | $709,862 | 388 | $1,830 | $82,870 |
| pootytherewardfarmer | $654,745 | 810 | $808 | $35,027 |
| Numitus1994 | $93,498 | 495 | $189 | $18,883 |
| SmartBoyBilly | $35,862 | 78 | $460 | $23,095 |
| Polimaki | $30,339 | 75 | $405 | $13,187 |
| smarterstrat | $25,566 | 155 | $165 | $11,960 |
| PPMT | $21,447 | 194 | $111 | $6,744 |
| JonnyA | $17,372 | 507 | $34 | $495 |
| e46m3 | $7,113 | 148 | $48 | $1,652 |
| tinyyyyy1 | $7,046 | 18 | $391 | $7,046 |
| 50testreward | $5,947 | 64 | $93 | $2,827 |
| qwen300.fund | $4,719 | 132 | $36 | $1,344 |
Eighteen of the 25 wallets have received rewards; the six not shown received under $4,000 each. Payouts read November 3, 2026.
Exhibit D What reward earners keep after their trades
A reward farmer's profit is its reward income plus what it makes or loses when its orders fill. Polymarket's all-time leaderboard figure for each wallet is its trading profit after fees, without rewards, so adding the two gives an approximate net. The trading figure covers all of a wallet's trades, not only those from farming.
| Wallet | Rewards | Trading profit | Net | Rewards lost on trading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dr.PNL | $709,862 | −$496,881 | $212,981 | 70% |
| pootytherewardfarmer | $654,745 | −$325,003 | $329,741 | 50% |
| Numitus1994 | $93,498 | −$31,943 | $61,554 | 34% |
| SmartBoyBilly | $35,862 | −$9,304 | $26,558 | 26% |
| Polimaki | $30,339 | −$18,741 | $11,598 | 62% |
| smarterstrat | $25,566 | −$19,633 | $5,933 | 77% |
| PPMT | $21,447 | +$14,455 | $35,902 | none |
| JonnyA | $17,372 | +$12,862 | $30,233 | none |
| e46m3 | $7,113 | +$949,783 | $956,896 | none |
| tinyyyyy1 | $7,046 | −$8,112 | −$1,066 | 115% |
| 50testreward | $5,947 | −$4,091 | $1,856 | 69% |
| qwen300.fund | $4,719 | +$524,251 | $528,970 | none |
Eight of the twelve lose money on their trades. Two of the four that don't, e46m3 and qwen300.fund, make almost all their money trading, with rewards a small extra. Eleven of the twelve still come out ahead overall. Rewards can be a business, but the fills the article warns about take a large share of them.
Exhibit E How big the reward pools are
Every market with an active reward pool, from Polymarket's public reward-market list, read November 3, 2026. That was US midterm Election Day, so the largest pools, on election markets, are probably larger than usual. Esports markets are those Polymarket tags “esports”.
| Group | Markets | Rewards per day |
|---|---|---|
| All markets with an active pool | 15,514 | $246,291 |
| Pools of $100 a day or more | 318 | $84,501 |
| Pools under $5 a day | 6,985 | $12,316 |
| Esports markets | 233 | $2,648 (1.1%) |
| Esports markets with no competing liquidity, by Polymarket's competitiveness score | 160 | $930 |
| The article's example market | 1 | $18 |
The median pool pays $5 a day. On this day, the author's stated $100–150 a day would be 4% to 6% of all esports reward money, which is possible but would mean taking a large share of the pools on many small markets.
Exhibit F Links in the article
The article's example market link carries a ?via=surfer tag. It ends with an invitation to the author's Telegram channel, “Surfer's Alpha”, which is also the website on the author's X profile. The image of the channel in the article shows it with one subscriber. The article promises a fuller breakdown in a later part. No wallet, bot or code repository is linked. The X profile describes the author as an on-chain expert who has been in crypto since 2018; the article says the author had never written code before 2026.