# Polymarket vs Polymarket US: one brand, two exchanges, no shared book

Two exchanges under one name, with no shared order book, custody, regulator, fee schedule or resolution. Where you live decides which one you may use.

*https://predictionmarkets.tools/compare/polymarket-vs-polymarket-us*

- https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket.md
- https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-us.md

## Two exchanges that share a name and nothing else

The two cards above carry the same logo and the same `vendor` field, and a reader who has seen
one has seen neither. [Polymarket](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket) is operated by Adventure One QSS, Inc.: a
self-custody central limit order book on Polygon, collateralised in pUSD — an ERC-20 backed
one-for-one by USDC and enforced on-chain — with outcome shares held as ERC-1155 tokens in your own
wallet. [Polymarket US](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-us) is operated by QCX LLC, which the CFTC's own record
shows designated as a contract market on 9 July 2025. It clears through QC Clearing LLC, holds US
dollars in a customer account its own FAQ says is kept separate from operating funds, and reaches
you through an app published by a third company, PM US Tech.

The international card puts it in one line: the two share a brand rather than an operator, a
regulator, a custody model, a fee schedule or a resolution authority. What neither card says in
one place is the consequence a trader feels first.

**There is no shared order book and no shared liquidity.** Each card describes one book, its own.
The international book matches orders from wallets holding pUSD; the US book matches orders from
identity-verified participants of a designated contract market holding dollars at a clearing
house, and that book is wiped weekly — every Thursday from 02:00 to 04:00 ET the US exchange
cancels every open order, answers 503 on its API and reopens with empty books. A counterparty on
one is not a participant on the other, and the two collateral units are not the same money. So
when the same-looking question shows two prices, those are two crowds pricing two contracts, not
one market quoted twice; nothing on either card says one price references the other.

**The app in the store is the American one.** The international card records that the iOS and
Android apps are published for the US store and carry the Polymarket US product, and that no
official app is listed in the international storefronts it checked. Outside the United States the
international platform is a web application. A reader who downloads "Polymarket" and a reader who
opens the website may be looking at different exchanges without either noticing.

## Who may use which is settled before anything else

Most comparisons end on jurisdiction. This one starts there, because for almost every reader it
removes the choice.

**A US reader has one option.** The international Terms of Use, effective 11 August 2026, bar
trading by anyone resident, located or incorporated in the United States, in capitals, with "THERE
ARE NO EXCEPTIONS". Reading is still permitted, and the live site tells a US visitor to switch to
polymarket.us. Using a VPN to get round it is prohibited, and the stated consequence is that the
wallet is put into close-only mode. Polymarket US is the mirror: US residents, at least 18 or the
higher age their state sets, and no excluded state named in either document its card could open.

**A reader outside the United States has at most one option, and often none.** Polymarket US makes
no claim of availability anywhere else: its terms make no representation that the app is
available in any specific location, and its funding rails are US debit cards, ACH and domestic
wires. The international platform restricts by **physical location rather than residency**,
according to its help page last updated 14 August 2026 — though its Terms, as above, also reach
residence for the United States. That page names 39 restricted countries plus Alberta, British
Columbia, Ontario and Quebec and the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions, under three statuses that
answer two different questions:

- **Fully blocked**, opening nothing: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France,
  Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil, among others.
- **Close-only**, exiting but not opening: Singapore, Poland, Thailand and Taiwan.
- **Hold to resolution**: Germany, whose existing positions must run to settlement before funds can
  be withdrawn.

So a reader in London, Paris or Sydney has neither of these two. A reader in Singapore can close
what they already hold on the international platform and open nothing on either. The list is less
settled than a bulleted summary makes it look: Polymarket's Terms name Hungary and Slovenia where
the help centre names Brazil, Japan, Malta and Burundi instead, and the
[Polymarket CLOB API](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-clob-api) card, reading the same restrictions page on 4
October 2026, records Ireland as close-only on the web app alone where the venue card, read on 19
September, has it fully blocked. Read the help centre on the day.
[Why a venue is unavailable where you are](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/why-a-venue-is-unavailable-where-you-are) covers
the four mechanisms that get called one word.

**Identity is the other half of who may use it.** The international platform runs no identity
check at signup: a click-through attestation that you are not a US person, not in a restricted
jurisdiction and not on a VPN, plus a reactive path — an ID and proof of address in a
non-restricted jurisdiction, within 14 days — used when an account is flagged. Polymarket US makes
identity verification mandatory and puts it **before your first deposit**: name, date of birth and
residential address, then a government ID and selfie where the automatic check fails, with manual
review quoted at three to five business days.

## How money gets in and out of each

The custody difference is not abstract. It decides what a deposit is, what a withdrawal is, and
how many steps lie between a resolved position and money you can spend.

**On the international platform there is no balance to withdraw, only tokens to redeem and move.**
You fund in USDC through an on-ramp — the card names Coinbase and MoonPay — which charges its own
fee; Polymarket charges none to deposit or withdraw. Getting out is three acts, as
[how money gets back out](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/how-money-gets-out) lays them out from Polymarket's own
documentation. Redeem after resolution, which burns your outcome tokens and returns pUSD. Unwrap
and swap pUSD into native USDC through a named Uniswap v3 pool, which the documentation warns can
be exhausted. Then bridge to the token and chain you want. Polymarket says it charges no
withdrawal fee and publishes no worked withdrawal quote; the one worked example in its bridge
documentation is a deposit, 10 USDC into pUSD, and returns 9.94 — 2 cents of gas, a 0.3% line
labelled bridge fee, 0.1% fill cost and 0.05% swap impact — which is the published measure of what
a hop through the bridge costs. Over 50,000 dollars the documentation suggests splitting the
withdrawal, and the only off-ramps it names, Coinbase and MoonPay, charge their own: MoonPay's
European disclosure puts a sell by bank transfer at up to 1%. None of that is in a fee schedule. And a jurisdiction status can reach money already
committed: close-only releases capital when you sell, hold-to-resolution does not release it until
the contract ends.

**On Polymarket US money leaves the way it came in.** Deposits are debit card, ACH or wire. Card
and ACH take three to four business days to clear, a wire one, and you can trade with funds in
flight but not withdraw them. Withdrawals are documented as free, go back to the **original funding
source only** — never a new or third-party account — and are processed first-in-first-out against
the deposits that funded them. Promotional credit is a trading credit rather than cash, and the
venue's own two pages disagree about whether it can ever leave; the card's advice is to assume the
stricter one.

**Nothing connects the two.** Polymarket US lists no crypto rail in either direction, and the
international platform holds no dollars. Neither card describes moving a balance or a position
from one to the other, so a trader who wanted to would be closing on one and opening on the other
— and on the two cards' own eligibility rules, there is no reader who may trade on both.

## The fee shape is shared; the coefficients and the maker side are not

`economics.fees_taker` on every card is the effective taker fee at 50 cents as a percentage of the
$1 payout. The two cards read **Polymarket 1.25** and **Polymarket US 1.74**. The maker field reads
**null** on the international card and **−0.31** on the US one. Those four numbers are the
comparable part; what sits behind them needs a sentence each.

**On the taker side the base is the same.** Both venues charge a coefficient times contracts times
price times one-minus-price — a rate on expected earnings, not on the fill, peaking at the midpoint
and falling towards nothing at both ends. What differs is the coefficient and what it varies by.
The international platform sets it by category: 0.07 on crypto, 0.05 on sports, economics,
culture, weather and the general bucket, 0.04 on finance, politics, mentions and tech, and zero on
geopolitics. Polymarket US has one coefficient, 0.0695, under the schedule effective from 25
September 2026, with two exceptions the card records — a separate, steeper curve on combos, and an
announced change taking Table Tennis to 0.10 from 7 October 2026.

At 50 cents, then, category by category: crypto 1.75% against 1.74%, a hundredth of a point apart;
sports and the general bucket 1.25% against 1.74%; politics and finance 1.00% against 1.74%; and
geopolitics free against 1.74%. At the midpoint the international platform is cheaper for a
taker in every category but crypto, where the two are level. Polymarket US pays takers back weekly off the
previous calendar month's notional — 10% from $250,000, 25% from $1 million, 50% from $10 million —
which takes its 1.74% to about 1.57%, 1.31% and 0.87%. The international card mentions a tiered
taker rebate and prints no tiers for it.

**On the maker side the percentages are percentages of different things.** On the international
platform makers are never charged, and their rebate is a share of the **taker fees collected** —
20% on crypto, 15% on sports, 25% on the other charged categories — paid daily out of that pool.
What you receive depends on what takers paid and your share of the pool, so there is no per-fill
figure to normalise, which is why the field is null rather than negative. On Polymarket US the
maker rebate is a coefficient, −0.0125, applied to **the maker's own fill** and credited at the
moment of the fill: 0.31% of the payout at 50 cents. One is a cut of a pool, the other a price on
your order.

**The units of payment differ too.** International fees are charged per share in pUSD. US fees are
in dollars, rounded to the cent with banker's rounding, and the exchange's own FAQ says a small
fill can round to zero.

For most readers none of this chooses a venue, because residence already has. It matters to
anyone reading the two prices side by side — the cost of acting on each differs by category before
the prices themselves are compared — and to anyone budgeting a resting-order book on the US
exchange. The [prediction market fee calculator](https://predictionmarkets.tools/calculators/prediction-market-fees) applies both
schedules to your own price and size, and [what a trade actually
costs](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/what-a-trade-actually-costs) explains the units.

## Who decides the outcome, and why the same question is two contracts

This is the field on which the international card says the two products are least alike.

**Internationally, Polymarket decides nothing.** The UMA optimistic oracle does. An outcome is
proposed against a bond, typically 750 pUSD — since 5 September 2025 only by whitelisted addresses
on markets where Polymarket applies UMA's proposer whitelist. Anyone may dispute within a two-hour
challenge window. One dispute sends the question to a second proposal round; a second escalates to
a vote of UMA token holders, which the company cannot overturn. A rare Unknown outcome pays 50
cents to each side. Clarifications are published on-chain and cannot change the intent of the
question.

**On Polymarket US the exchange decides, and that is the end of it.** Its rulebook names the
exchange as the Source Agency, determining each contract against primary, secondary and tertiary
sources listed in that contract's terms; sources not listed have no effect. Rule 10.4 lets named
officers review an outcome at sole discretion and states the company's determinations are final.
Rule 10.5 settles contracts about a person who dies or is incapacitated at last traded prices, not
subject to review. Rule 10.3 lets the company modify a contract's specifications after you hold it,
including the settlement date, the payout condition and the interpretation of resolution criteria.

Neither offers an appeal to the company. Only one offers anything a third party can enter — a bond
and two hours on the international platform. [Who decides the
outcome](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/who-decides-the-outcome) sets both beside the other venues.

**The consequence for a reader comparing the two prices: the same headline is two contracts.**
Each venue writes its own terms, so the named source, the close, the fallback when the question
cannot be answered and the authority that applies them are set separately — and nothing on either
card says the two are drafted to match. They do not share an identifier either: the international
platform addresses an outcome by token, the US exchange by a market slug such as
`aec-nfl-lac-ten-2025-11-02`. Line them up on the rule text, never the title, as [how to match the
same question across venues](https://predictionmarkets.tools/how-to/match-a-question-across-venues) sets out. The listings
cannot be lined up by count either: the US card records 2,611 open sports events and 1,167 open
politics events on its public API on 19 September 2026, and the international card prints a list
of categories and no counts.

## For developers, two integrations, not one with a flag

Nothing written for one reaches the other; the international card and the US API card both say so
in nearly those words.

The international platform splits its interfaces across several cards: the
[Polymarket Gamma API](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-gamma-api) for markets and metadata, the
[Polymarket CLOB API](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-clob-api) for the book and order placement, and the
[Polymarket Data API](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-data-api) for trades, positions and holders. Reading the
book takes nothing. Placing an order takes a Polygon wallet, an EIP-712 signature to derive
credentials, an HMAC-SHA256 signature on every request and a pUSD balance — and no identity check.
There is no test environment. The current Python client is
[polymarket-client](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-client); [py-clob-client](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/py-clob-client) is archived.
The CLOB card's warning matters most to a US developer: the read endpoints answer from anywhere, so
a successful read proves nothing about whether you may trade.

Polymarket US has one API card, the [Polymarket US API](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-us-api), on two hosts: a
keyless public gateway for markets, books, settlement prices and search, and an authenticated host
for orders, portfolio and balances, signed with an Ed25519 key in three request headers. Getting
that key means installing the iOS app, opening an account and passing identity verification —
there is no developer path around the app. The official SDKs are the
[Polymarket US Python SDK](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-us-python) and the
[Polymarket US TypeScript SDK](https://predictionmarkets.tools/tools/polymarket-us-typescript), both installed as `polymarket-us`,
and both registry releases date from January 2026 while their repositories carry commits from
September. Plan around the Thursday window: orders cancelled, 503s, empty books.

Different hosts, different identifiers, different signing, a wallet on one side and a KYC'd account
on the other. [What each Polymarket API holds](https://predictionmarkets.tools/guides/what-each-polymarket-api-holds) maps the
international set in full.

## What the two cards rest on

Both cards carry **19 September 2026** as the verification date for availability and for pricing,
so the jurisdiction facts on this page were read on the same day for both. The fee text is not
level: the US card's fee section quotes a schedule effective from 25 September and an announcement
read on 7 October, so on fees its side of this page is roughly three weeks fresher than the
international side, whose fee table was read on 19 September. The international restrictions page
also moved under the catalogue's feet — by 21 September its country notes and close-only list no
longer rendered outside a browser, so the Germany sentence above is the 19 September reading.

## Which one, and when

**Decide by where you are first, because the two cards leave no overlap.**

**In the United States, Polymarket US — and your real comparison is with Kalshi.** The
international platform is view-only to you, and a VPN breaches its Terms and puts the wallet into
close-only mode. Read [Kalshi vs Polymarket US vs Robinhood](https://predictionmarkets.tools/compare/us-event-contract-venues)
next: that is the choice a US reader actually has, and it is where the maker rebate and the
Thursday window are weighed against a rival exchange rather than against a sibling you cannot use.

**Outside the United States, the international Polymarket where your physical location is not on
its lists**, because Polymarket US claims nothing outside the US and its rails are US-only. Check
the help centre on the day you fund, not a summary of it, and ask the close-only question before
the fee question: in Singapore, Poland, Thailand or Taiwan you may exit and not open, and in
Germany a position is held to resolution. If neither is open to you, the choice is among the
offshore venues in [Polymarket vs Limitless vs Myriad](https://predictionmarkets.tools/compare/offshore-prediction-market-venues).

**Then by what you need from the venue you are left with.** If being able to contest a resolution
matters, only the international platform has a process — a bond, two hours and a vote — and a US
reader who needs that will not find it in this pairing. If you need dollars back on a known bank
rail, Polymarket US returns them to the source that funded them, free and in deposit order, where
the international exit is redeem, swap and bridge, best quoted before you start. If you are
reading both prices for research or a dashboard, both are readable without a key from anywhere;
treat them as two contracts with two rulebooks and match them on the rules, never the brand.

## FAQ

### Is Polymarket US the same company as Polymarket?

Same brand, different operator. The international platform is run by Adventure One QSS, Inc. Polymarket US is QCX LLC, a CFTC-designated contract market since 9 July 2025, cleared by QC Clearing LLC, with its app published by a third entity, PM US Tech. Neither card documents a corporate relationship beyond the shared name, and the US card declines to state a purchase price that no filing it could open supports.

### Can I move a position or a balance from one to the other?

Neither card describes any route. An international position is an ERC-1155 token in your own wallet, settled in pUSD on Polygon. A Polymarket US position is a contract held through a clearing house in dollars, funded only by debit card, ACH or wire, and withdrawals go back only to the method that funded them. Moving means closing on one and opening on the other, and on the two cards' own eligibility rules nobody may trade on both.

### Do they share prices or an order book?

No. Each card describes its own book and only its own. The international book takes orders from wallets collateralised in pUSD; the US book takes orders from identity-verified participants holding dollars, and is emptied every Thursday from 02:00 to 04:00 ET. Two books with two sets of participants form two prices, and nothing on either card says one references the other.

### Which of the two can I use?

If you are in the United States, Polymarket US only. The international Terms bar anyone resident, located or incorporated in the US and leave reading as the fallback. Outside the US, the international platform wherever your physical location is not on its blocked or close-only lists; Polymarket US claims no availability outside the United States, and its funding rails are US debit cards, ACH and domestic wires.