Polymarket's Paid Promos Reach Esports, With Orders to 'Look Organic': Report

A Discord Server and a Payout Dashboard

Polymarket is paying social media users to quote-retweet posts from its branded esports accounts on X, Mikhail Klimentov reported in his ReaderGrev newsletter on Oct. 15, citing messages from Polymarket representatives in the program’s Discord server, interviews with participants, and documents shared with them.

Participants are pinged in channels for League of Legends, Valorant, Counter-Strike, and Dota 2 with links to posts to like and quote. “New tweet is up: Like + QRT. Replies appreciated,” reads a typical prompt.

“Literally this needs to look organic and if your X profile looks like Polymarket billboard that looks absoutely [sic] awful,” one representative wrote in the Discord. On Wednesday, with the League of Legends World Championship coming up, a representative told participants to expect more posts each day and to post “plenty in between so it looks organic if your [sic] gonna QRT daily.”

The prompts used to include the line “+ Paid Partnership tag,” urging participants to use X’s disclosure label, but it has not appeared since late August, for reasons ReaderGrev said were not immediately clear. Polymarket’s External Marketing Guidelines, shared with participants during onboarding, say disclosure “must be clear, conspicuous, in plain language, and not hidden,” and many of the quote-posts appear to carry X’s paid partnership tag. The guidelines also bar participants from recommending trades. One participant, who asked not to be named, told ReaderGrev the posts “are all flagged as promotion, as is the original tweet.”

Fees are negotiated when a participant joins and are based on the views their posts typically drew beforehand, not on how the paid posts perform. Participants showed ReaderGrev fees of $45 and $75 per post, another described a fee of $200 to $300, and one made nearly $900 in a month from about a dozen posts. Two others said payouts start at $10. Participants log their posts, tax details, and crypto wallet addresses in a dashboard called PolyTrack, and a representative wrote that anyone who brings in a new participant earns 3% of what that person makes each month. ReaderGrev estimated that Polymarket pays out $2,000 to $4,000 per post in its busier programs, a figure it called “almost certainly an undercount.”

In a July Discord post, a representative said the team had phased out PayPal payments because its accounts kept “getting blocked” due to the volume of payments. In June, Politico reported that Polymarket’s chief marketing officer had used his personal PayPal account to pay influencers, including at least $350,000 to creators who promoted the platform on X, about two dozen of whom posted roughly 490 times without disclosing they were paid. Weeks later, The Wall Street Journal found that Polymarket had paid creators to stage winning bets on copies of its site.

At the start of that month, a representative put participation at “300+ creators”; two months later, another put it at “800+.” Its participants range from esports commentators, current and former pros, and coaches to accounts with low four-figure followings. The push comes as Riot Games, which runs the League of Legends and Valorant circuits, has held sponsorship talks with Polymarket and Kalshi, Bloomberg reported in September. Polymarket did not respond to ReaderGrev’s requests for comment.