About 30 percent According to a recent study, Polymarket’s trading volume comes from the United States – an impressive number considering none of these people can legally apply the cryptocurrency-based platform.
A study by Rutgers University statistician Harry Crane estimated that people in the U.S. moved between $10.6 billion and $26.7 billion through Polymarket. To track platform activity, Crane looked at trades that appeared to be U.S.-based on foreign forecast market platforms from May 2025 through the end of April 2026. He found that many of the highest-volume markets on the Polymarket platform were U.S.-centric, including those covering U.S. elections and sporting events. US-based traders appear to have participated in the Polymarket sports industry at particularly high rates; the study estimated that they account for approximately half of the activity in these markets.
“We know there are individuals out there, but we don’t know to what extent — whether it’s going to be one person, or 10, or actually a significant fraction,” says Crane, who is also a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee, a panel that offers federal regulators guidance on technology’s impact on markets. The Coalition for Prediction Markets, a lobbying group acting 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 no.
Polymarket is one of the most popular prediction markets in the world, allowing customers to trade the outcome of future events, from the winner of the NBA Finals to the price of bitcoin in five-minute intervals to military action in Iran. It has partnered with US media companies such as Substack and Dow Jones, as well as US sports leagues such as Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.
However, major crypto platform Polymarket has been banned in the US since 2022 when federal regulators found it was operating as an unregistered derivatives trading platform. From December 2025, Polymarket operated a separate forecast market available on a US-licensed mobile app called Polymarket US. According to report Pew Research shows that Polymarket US’s trading volume in April 2026 was approximately $1.6 billion, while the main cryptocurrency-based platform reached approximately $9 billion, making it a much larger market.
To circumvent the digital lockout, US traders are believed to be hiding their locations to access the Polymarket website, often using virtual private networks to disguise their country of origin. (Polymarket Terms of Exploit prohibits For this reason, quantifying the size of the market is complex and this is the first grave public attempt to provide estimates.
Lacking a reliable means of directly observing the geography of site traffic, Crane developed a methodology that assumes that U.S. traders have different behaviors compared to their international counterparts, taking into account the time of day at which trades are made and the markets in which trades are made (for example, U.S. traders are more interested in sporting events taking place in the U.S. than their counterparts around the world). The resulting estimates are therefore imprecise, but nevertheless provide the best picture of how many US users are likely to be secretly participating in the study. “It’s not a perfect result, but I think it provides a reasonable estimate of the portion of volume that is accounted for by trading in offshore markets,” says University of Toronto Scarborough finance professor Charles Martineau, who has studied Polymarket’s trading behavior. “But the use of these indirect proxies is common in financial research.”
Polymarket declined to comment.
The CFTC does not typically have authority over foreign forecasting markets, but last month the agency’s president, Michael Selig, told WIRED that it is willing to apply extraterritorial jurisdiction to target suspicious entities on a case-by-case basis. It’s unclear whether the agency would bother tracking down U.S.-based traders who used VPNs to get around the ban but otherwise complied with the law. The CFTC did not respond to requests for comment.
In April, there was a very high-profile example of an individual in the United States making a Polymarket transaction: The Department of Justice charged a Special Forces soldier with allegedly using secret information about the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to obtain approximately $400,000 in profits from a Polymarket transaction.
The study suggests that US activity will continue to boom on the site if crypto platform Polymarket maintains its market share. It is estimated that by 2030, the trading volume in the US may reach $133 billion.