What to use instead of Polymarket

The product

Polymarket is the venue most readers of this catalogue arrive already holding, and the brand covers two products: the international platform on Polygon, which is the subject here, and Polymarket US, which is a different operating company under a different regulator. Our card on the international platform describes what it is. This page is about the three ways people end up wanting out of it, because they are three different problems with three different answers.

Your location is blocked, or close-only. This is the common one, and it is worth reading the mechanism rather than the headline. Polymarket's geographic-restrictions page, last updated 14 August 2026, states that permissions follow physical location rather than residency — so travelling changes your status in both directions — and names 39 restricted countries plus four Canadian provinces and three regions of Ukraine. Three statuses exist and they are not the same restriction. Fully blocked covers the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil, among others. Close-only — existing positions may be closed, nothing new opened — covers Singapore, Poland, Thailand and Taiwan. Germany appears twice: blocked from opening and required to hold to resolution, so its capital is locked for the life of the contract. Using a VPN to get round any of it is prohibited, and the stated consequence is that the wallet is put into close-only mode.

Two of Polymarket's own current documents disagree about who is on the list — the Terms of Use effective 11 August 2026 name Hungary and Slovenia, the help centre names Brazil, Japan, Malta and Burundi and not the other two — so check the help centre, on the day, before you conclude you have been shut out.

You do not want a token-holder vote deciding your contract. Polymarket resolves nothing itself. An outcome is proposed against a bond, typically 750 pUSD, with a two-hour challenge window; one dispute sends it to a second proposal round and a second dispute escalates to the UMA Data Verification Mechanism, a vote of UMA token holders. That vote is the final word and there is no route from it back to the company. Some readers leave over exactly this. Read What you give up before you do, because the alternative on most of this list is not a better appeal, it is no appeal.

You are in the United States and want an account rather than a read-only page. The terms bar US trading in capitals, with the sentence "THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS". Nothing about the international platform is negotiable here, and the answer is a different venue, not a different approach to this one.

What to use instead

If you are fully blocked and outside the US, start with the venue whose restricted list does not overlap Polymarket's. Kalshi is the sharpest case: Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan and South Korea are absent from the 55 jurisdictions its member agreement restricts, and three of those five — Germany, the Netherlands and Japan — are on Polymarket's blocked list. It settles in dollars on a CFTC-designated exchange, so the trade is a regulated event contract rather than an on-chain position. Check the list rather than the continent — Kalshi restricts the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Ireland, India and China, all of which Polymarket also blocks, and for a reader in any of those neither venue is the answer.

If you are one of the close-only four, Kalshi is not the escape: Singapore, Poland, Taiwan and Thailand are all on its restricted list too. The on-chain venues are, because their own lists are much shorter. Limitless bars the United States, the "Republic of China" and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Alberta from trading and nothing else beyond the sanctioned territories, which leaves Poland, Thailand and Singapore served. Myriad names nineteen prohibited territories — including France, Malta, Singapore and Switzerland, which a reader may not expect — and does not name Poland, Thailand or Taiwan. A Singapore reader has a third route as well: ForecastEx is reached through a broker rather than directly, and Interactive Brokers' own disclosures name its Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland and Canada entities among the ones whose eligible clients can trade forecast contracts.

If your objection is the oracle, the honest split is between venues that resolve mechanically and venues where a person decides. On Limitless most markets are resolved automatically by Pyth at the deadline, and the 5- and 15-minute crypto markets by a Chainlink time-weighted average, which takes both the operator and the vote out of it; custom event markets still go to the team, 24 to 72 hours after close. ForecastEx is the other end of the same idea inside a regulated exchange: each contract's own terms-and-conditions document names the source agency in advance, and the building-permits contract says in as many words that only the initial release counts and later revisions do not change the outcome. That is a rule you can read before you take the position, which is the property people actually want from an oracle. What none of them give you is somebody to argue with.

If you are in the United States, the list is short and it is all cash-settled and identity-verified. Polymarket US is the same brand — QCX LLC, designated as a contract market on 9 July 2025, clearing through QC Clearing — and it is the only one where the interface will feel familiar; note that the maker side is paid there, a $0.31 rebate per 100 contracts at the midpoint, rather than merely not charged. Kalshi is the older venue with the broader series list and the more complete API. ForecastEx is the odd one out and worth a look if what you traded was macro: no sports at all, no direct account, and interest paid on your collateral while the position is open — Rule 612(c) requires the clearing house to pass it through, and Interactive Brokers quoted 3.38% APY on 19 September 2026.

If every real-money venue bars you, Futuur still takes your forecast: the play-money side, denominated in Ooms, is open worldwide, and the same questions run in USDC for everyone the licence permits. A record is not a position, but it is more than a read-only page.

What you give up

The book. This is the loss, and every migration guide written by a competitor skips it. Polymarket is the deepest venue in the category, and depth is not a feature you can list — it is whether there is a price on the other side at the size you want, on a question three people care about. Limitless and Kalshi both run real order books and both have markets where the book is empty; the AMM venues, Myriad and Futuur, always quote, and charge you for it in slippage. On Myriad the volume on a sampled open Linea market was under 10,000 USDC against several million on the featured BNB Chain ones, which is the shape of the problem rather than an exception to it.

An appeal, such as it was. If you are leaving because a token-holder vote decided your contract, count what replaces it. Kalshi's markets team determines the outcome and there is no bond, no dispute window and no third-party vote. On Polymarket US, Rule 10.4 lets named officers review a market at sole discretion and states that determinations are final, and Rule 10.5 makes its own determinations "not subject to review". Limitless will accept that a market misresolved and refund you what you paid for the shares — your cost basis, not the dollar the correct side should have paid — while the side that was wrongly paid out keeps the money, because the payout already settled on-chain. Myriad voids an unresolvable market at its market value at the moment of cancellation, which can be less than you paid. UMA's bonded proposal and challenge window are slow, public and occasionally infuriating. They are also the most process anybody in this category offers.

A fee schedule with a free category in it. Polymarket charges takers a coefficient times price times one-minus-price, never charges makers, and sets the coefficient to zero on geopolitics — an entire category that costs nothing to take. Kalshi's zero-fee series exist but are enumerated in a table of 155 exceptions rather than granted to a subject area, and its standard taker coefficient is 0.07 against Polymarket's 0.05 for most categories. Limitless charges 3.00% on an order-book buy at any price up to 50 cents, which is precisely where a longshot position sits. Read the schedule against the prices you actually trade, not at the midpoint.

The tooling. This is the catalogue-specific loss and it is larger than it looks. Something a quarter of the cards in this catalogue are built on Polymarket and only on Polymarket — the Gamma and CLOB APIs, the Python client, wallet and trader analytics at Polymarket Analytics, Polysights, OrcaLayer and Convexly, the Dune dashboards over its on-chain record. None of that follows you. The cross-venue clients — Polyrama, Synthesis, pmxt — reach Kalshi as well, and Limitless and Myriad each ship their own API and MCP server, but a Polygon-native analytics stack has no counterpart on a CFTC exchange whose order flow is not on a public chain.

A wallet instead of an onboarding. There is no identity check in Polymarket's ordinary flow — an account is a wallet and a click-through attestation. Both US exchanges require verified identity before your first deposit, and on Polymarket US withdrawals return only to the original funding source, first-in-first-out against the deposits that funded them, after a three-to-four day clearing wait on cards and ACH. That is a slower, more traceable relationship with your own money, which is the point of it and also the cost.

Migration notes

Get out before the status changes, not after. The close-only and hold-to-resolution rules are applied to the wallet, not negotiated. A German holder cannot sell out early at all, and the four close-only countries can close but not re-enter, which means a hedge that needs both legs is not something you can run there any more. If your jurisdiction is drifting towards the list, the cheapest moment to leave is while the book will still take the other side of you.

Nothing transfers, and the contracts are not the same contracts. Closing and re-opening costs you the spread twice plus both fees, and the new contract settles under different rules against a different source decided by a different authority. Read the replacement's resolution criteria before you assume it is the same question. On Kalshi that reading is easy — every event exposes a machine-readable settlement_sources array of names and URLs through the public API — and on the on-chain venues it is the market page, which is the authoritative rule there.

Your collateral changes shape. Leaving for a US exchange means off-ramping pUSD or USDC into dollars at a clearing house, with the tax conversation that goes with a disposal in most countries; leaving for Limitless or Myriad keeps you in stablecoins but moves you to a different chain, with its own gas and its own bridge. Myriad adds a flat 0.0085 USD per transaction to cover gas, and 31 of the 70 open markets there on 19 September 2026 were denominated in PTS season points rather than in money at all — they look identical to stablecoin markets in the interface, so check the token before you take the position.

Budget for the identity check, and for its timing. Kalshi wants a driver's licence or passport photographed live in the app — an upload from the camera roll or a photograph of a screen is rejected — and its help centre warns that the CFTC may require proof of address, employment information and source of funds on top. Polymarket US requires verification to complete before you can deposit or trade at all, with manual review quoted at three to five business days where the automatic check fails. Futuur sits in between: no check to start, then proof of identity and address once lifetime deposits pass the equivalent of 2,000 USD.

Check the funding rail separately from the eligibility rule. They are different facts and the second one is discovered after the deposit. Kalshi serves many countries but ACH, PayPal and Venmo are US-only, so an international account funds by debit card, by wire with a $1,000 minimum, or by crypto — and withdraws by debit card or crypto only. Futuur requires a deposit to be staked at least once before it can be withdrawn. ForecastEx has no account at all: you reach it through a futures commission merchant, under that broker's own onboarding, and the age floor is 21 through Interactive Brokers against 18 through Robinhood.

If you are leaving for a regulated exchange, read what is fixed and what is not. On Polymarket US, Rule 10.3 permits the company to modify contract specifications — including the settlement date and the payout condition — after you hold the position, and every Thursday between 02:00 and 04:00 ET the maintenance window cancels every resting order on the exchange. Neither has an equivalent on a Polygon order book, and neither is visible unless you go looking for it.