Americans trade billions of dollars on banned offshore platform Polymarket

Nearly 30 percent Subordinate commerce size on Polymarket It comes from the United States, according to a new study — a staggering number, considering that none of these people are legally allowed to use it encryptionPlatform based.

The study, conducted by Rutgers University statistician Harry Crane, estimated that people in the United States transferred between $10.6 to $26.7 billion through Polymarket. To track platform activity, Crane looked at what appeared to be US-based trades on offshore prediction market platforms from May 2025 to the end of April 2026. He found that many of Polymarket’s highest volume markets were US-centric, including those covering US elections and sporting events. US-based traders appear to participate in the Polymarket sports market at particularly high rates; The study estimated that they represent nearly half of the activity in those markets.

“It’s known that there are individuals out there, but what’s not known is the extent of it, whether it’s one or 10 or a really tangible fraction,” says Crane, who is also a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee, a panel that provides guidance to federal regulators on how technology will impact markets. The Prediction Markets Alliance, a lobbying group on behalf of the industry, commissioned and funded the study, although Crane retained editorial control. Kalshi, Coinbase, Crypto.com and other major players in the prediction market are members of this group. Polymarket is not.

Polymarket is one of the most popular prediction markets in the world, allowing clients to trade the outcomes of future events ranging from the winner of the NBA Finals to the price of Bitcoin in five-minute increments to military operations in Iran. It has partnered with US-based media companies such as Substack and Dow Jones, as well as US sports leagues such as Major League Baseball and the NHL.

But the underlying cryptocurrency-based platform, Polymarket, has been banned in the US since 2022, when federal regulators discovered it was operating as an unregistered derivatives trading platform. Since December 2025, Polymarket It worked A separate prediction market is available on a US-licensed mobile app, called Polymarket US. according to a report From Pew Research, Polymarket US trading volume in April 2026 was about $1.6 billion, while the underlying cryptocurrency-based platform was about $9 billion, making it the largest market by a wide margin.

To get around the digital blockade, US traders are believed to hide their locations to access the Polymarket website, often using virtual private networks to hide their country of origin. (Polymarket Terms of Service Forbidden Use of VPNs.) For this reason, it is difficult to determine the size of the market, and this is the first major public attempt to provide an estimate.

Without reliable ways to directly monitor the geography of site traffic, Crane came up with a methodology that assumed U.S. traders had distinct behaviors compared to their international counterparts, given the time of day trades were made, and the markets in which the trades were made (for example, U.S. traders pay more attention to U.S.-based sporting events than their global counterparts). The resulting estimate is therefore imprecise, but it nonetheless provides the best glimpse into how many US-based users are likely to participate surreptitiously. “It’s not perfect, but I think it provides a reasonable estimate of the portion of volume that is attributable to offshore trading,” says Charles Martineau, a University of Toronto Scarborough associate professor of finance, who has studied trading behavior at Polymarket. “But the use of these indirect proxies is common in finance research.”

Polymarket declined to comment.

The CFTC doesn’t typically have authority over offshore prediction markets, but agency head Michael Selig does He told WIRED Last month he said he was willing to use extraterritorial jurisdiction to nab bad actors on a case-by-case basis. It is not clear whether the agency will be interested in tracking down US-based traders who used VPNs to circumvent the ban but complied with the law. The CFTC did not respond to requests for comment.

In April, there was a very prominent example of someone in the US trading on Polymarket: the Department of Justice Charged A Special Forces soldier is accused of using classified information about the arrest of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to liquidate about $400,000 in profits from Polymarket trades.

The study suggests that activity in the US will continue to boom on the site if Polymarket’s cryptocurrency platform maintains its market share. It is estimated that US trade could reach $133 billion by 2030.