The 9 Hour War: Chasing Jane Street Money From a Melbourne Bedroom

I started the day with 17 dollars, a Python script, and a vague plan to siphon a few basis points from Polymarket. Nine hours later I had 3.63 left, zero algorithmic trades, and a pending 2 dollar transfer from my partner so I could keep going.

The trigger was a headline. You have seen them. Crypto traders minting money on election prediction markets. One mentioned Jane Street pulling in roughly 388,000 dollars a month providing liquidity on Polymarket.

I am in Melbourne. I know Python. I had 17 dollars in a MetaMask wallet. The math felt simple. Write a bot. Hit the API. Capture the spread. Scale.

Nine hours later the only thing I had scaled was my understanding of the gap between retail and institutional.

This is what it took just to reach the starting line.

Phase 1. The VPN fantasy.

Polymarket blocks Australia. I turned on a VPN, set it to Germany, and fired my script.

403 Forbidden.

New Zealand. Blocked. UK. Blocked.

Large exchanges do not just check your country. They use enterprise security that fingerprints your connection. If you are coming from a known VPN data center, they know. You do not get rate limited. You get erased.

I spent three hours fighting Cloudflare with consumer tools. Cloudflare won immediately and repeatedly.

Phase 2. The zombie account.

Eventually I slipped through using an obscure VPN endpoint. The site loaded. I connected my wallet. I signed the message.

Nothing happened.

The page bounced between Login and Sign Up forever.

I started debugging. Scripts multiplied. By mid afternoon I was on version 611 of a Python file whose only job was to tell me why nothing worked.

The answer was worse than a bug. I had created a zombie account.

The blockchain knew me. My wallet had deployed a proxy contract. But Polymarket’s centralized database never completed my signup. From their point of view I did not exist. Every login signature was rejected because there was no user to attach it to.

I could not access the interface at all.

Phase 3. The missing money.

Then I checked my wallet. The 17 dollars were gone.

I assumed I had been hacked or bled dry by gas fees. Neither was true.

I wrote another script to scan the Polygon contracts directly, bypassing the website entirely. That is how I found the money.

In my early manual attempts I had placed a 1 dollar bet and a 10 dollar bet. The cash was gone, but the proxy contract held 11 dollars worth of ERC 1155 betting tokens. The rest had been consumed by contract deployment costs.

On paper I had assets. In practice I had 3.63 in liquid cash and 11 dollars trapped behind a login screen I could not reach.

Phase 4. The institutional lesson.

At this point I was ready to try anything. Tor. Free proxy lists. Questionable IPs from questionable forums.

Then the obvious clicked.

Jane Street is not using NordVPN. They are not rotating free proxies. They are logging in from physical offices with clean IP ranges and dedicated pipes. They walk through the front door. I was rattling the fire exit with a paperclip.

Tor would get me blocked instantly. A random proxy would get me robbed. Retail tricks were not going to beat institutional infrastructure.

If you want to compete with institutions, you have to look like one.

The stalemate.

Nine hours in, my retail identity is burned. That wallet is flagged. It is functionally useless.

The only viable path is to rebuild the stack properly. A virtual server in a permitted jurisdiction. A private IP. An encrypted tunnel. No shared infrastructure. No consumer VPN fingerprints.

The plan is an AWS micro instance in Sao Paulo. From Melbourne, I tunnel into Brazil. From Brazil, I hit Polymarket. To them, I am just another user sitting quietly in a South American data center.

There is one catch.

AWS needs to place a temporary 1.50 charge on my credit card.

My card balance is zero.

So I am sitting here, nine hours deep, having turned 17 dollars into 3.63, waiting on a 2 dollar transfer so I can spin up institutional grade cloud infrastructure just to place a 1 dollar bet.

Jane Street makes this look trivial. It is not.

But the real lesson is clearer now. The edge is not the algorithm. It is everything wrapped around it. Identity, infrastructure, and access.

Tomorrow I find out whether the Brazilian tunnel works. Or whether I am down another two dollars and a little more educated.