P2P.me Bet on Fundraise Without Telling Investors

There are better ways to demonstrate confidence in your own company. Betting on it via a prediction market, without telling your backers, is apparently not one of them.

P2P.me, a stablecoin startup with Coinbase Ventures and Multicoin Capital on its cap table, spent the weekend apologizing after it emerged that the company had placed wagers on Polymarket tied to the success of its own fundraising round. The bets paid off. The aftermath didn’t.

“It created confusion and hurt trust,” the company wrote on X. “We should have let the work, the product, and the mission speak for themselves. That was our mistake.”

The financial stakes were modest – less than $15,000 in profit. The reputational hit was not.

Nobody Told the Investors

What made the situation worse was who didn’t know. According to people familiar with the matter, some of P2P.me’s largest backers had no idea the India-based firm had taken positions linked to its own fundraising outcome. They found out the same way everyone else did.

The raise itself was conducted through MetaDAO, a governance and capital formation platform on the Solana blockchain. 

Some of P2P.me’s positions would have paid out if the round hit $140 million in commitments. The bets that actually paid out were tied to a far more modest $6 million threshold – which, as fundraising targets go, is a somewhat easier call when you’re the one doing the raising.

The company says the trades were placed roughly ten days before its public campaign launched, at a point when it had received only a non-binding $3 million oral commitment from Multicoin Capital. 

It did not, it insisted, view this as trading on a done deal. 

Whether that framing is convincing depends a great deal on your tolerance for fine distinctions.

A Stunt Gone Too Far

Prohp3t, a co-founder of MetaDAO who goes by a pseudonym, did not defend the move but did offer some context. He called it “a guerrilla marketing stunt gone too far.” MetaDAO, he said, would have pushed back had it known in advance. As a gesture of good faith, the platform has since offered refunds to anyone who wants out before the round closes. So far, about $20,000 of the $6.7 million raised has been requested back – a small fraction, but not nothing.

There’s a timing wrinkle worth noting. 

Polymarket updated its rules just days before P2P.me’s campaign went live, explicitly banning insider trading. 

The platform’s policy now bars trading by anyone who holds enough authority or influence to affect the outcome of an event they’re wagering on. P2P.me’s trades, depending on how you read that language, sit uncomfortably close to the line – or over it.

The Transparency Defense

P2P.me’s response leaned on one notable argument: the Polymarket account, operating under the name “P2P Team,” was never hidden. 

It had made 27 predictions. Its largest single gain – $8,173 from a January bet on a separate MetaDAO project – was right there in the public record. The company framed this as a transparency point. Critics might frame it differently.

Neither Multicoin Capital nor Polymarket had commented publicly by the time this was reported. P2P.me, for its part, says it will now implement formal internal policies around prediction market activity.

Which raises a question the crypto industry is going to be grappling with for a while: if a market lets anyone bet on anything, what exactly are the rules when you happen to know something no one else does – because you’re the thing being bet on?