How money gets back out

Every venue in this catalogue documents how to fund an account. The deposit flow is short, it is the first thing the product shows you, and it is the part the vendor has the most reason to make smooth.

The reverse direction is documented too, but in a different place, usually across four or five pages that nobody reads before depositing: a hold table, an anti-money-laundering rule about which account funds may return to, a jurisdiction note, and — on the on-chain venues — a bridge reference written for developers. Put together, they say something the deposit screen does not: the set of ways money can leave is not the set of ways it came in, and it is smaller.

This page is that half. It is not a walkthrough of any venue's withdrawal button; the vendor's own documentation is better at that and changes faster than this page will. It is the set of constraints that only become visible after the money is in.

How it works

The exit rail is derived from the entry rail

The rule takes three different forms and they are worth telling apart, because they fail at different moments.

Same source, enforced. Polymarket US is the strictest statement of it. Its withdrawal rules say all withdrawals must return to the same payment method used for the deposit, that funds cannot be redirected to new or third-party accounts, and that withdrawals are processed first-in-first-out against the deposits that funded them — its own example is that after a 100 dollar card deposit and a later 200 dollar ACH deposit, the first 100 dollars withdrawn returns to the card. The stated reason is anti-money-laundering compliance, which is also why asking support nicely does not move it. Futuur's terms carry the same rule in one sentence: withdrawals are processed by the method used to deposit.

A prerequisite deposit. Kalshi allows several methods, but one of them is conditional. Its crypto withdrawal article states plainly that a prior crypto deposit is required in order to withdraw via crypto — if you have never deposited with crypto, crypto is not offered as a withdrawal method at all. For an international user that is not a detail, because the same help centre says bank withdrawals are available for US users only and that international accounts withdraw by debit card or crypto instead. An international reader who funds by wire and never touches crypto has exactly one way out, and it is the card.

A method that only runs one way. Kalshi's own hold table lists Cash App as US only, deposits only, with no withdrawal row at all. That is the rule in its purest form: a rail can exist on the deposit screen and not exist on the withdrawal screen.

And the whole account can be one-directional. Myriad accepts Apple Pay, Venmo, credit and debit cards and Revolut through a payment provider from 20 dollars, or crypto from 3 dollars. Its withdrawal documentation offers two destinations: any Ethereum-compatible wallet on BNB Smart Chain, paid in USD1 tokens, or an Abstract wallet, paid in USDC.e. There is no route back to the card. A reader who funded with Apple Pay and expected Apple Pay to be the exit needs a wallet, a chain and an address before they can be paid at all.

ForecastEx is the edge case that proves the point by having no rails of its own. Its rulebook bars individuals from membership, so there is no ForecastEx account, no ForecastEx deposit and no ForecastEx withdrawal — money moves through whichever futures commission merchant you reached it through, on that firm's terms and timetable, and the exchange's documents say nothing about it.

Three clocks, and only one of them is about your trade

The clearing hold. Polymarket US calls money that has landed but not cleared funds in flight: it can be traded and cannot be withdrawn. Card and ACH deposits take three to four business days to clear, wires one; if a deposit is still pending after five business days the documentation says to contact support. Kalshi's holds are shorter and shaped differently — they depend on whether you are withdrawing by the same method you deposited with. Same method, funds are available once the deposit settles; a different method adds up to two days after settlement on debit and ACH, while PayPal, Venmo, crypto and wire carry no hold. Kalshi adds one detail that costs people a day: the hold runs from the exact time of the deposit, not from the start of that day. It also says deposits cannot be cancelled or refunded once submitted, so a mistyped amount is not undone, it is withdrawn later.

The review. Futuur reviews every confirmed withdrawal by hand, generally within 24 hours, and only sends it to the network afterwards; before that there is an email confirmation step, so a withdrawal that is never confirmed from the inbox never happens. Its terms give the outside figure as two banking days and reserve additional identification checks for any withdrawal at any size. PredictIt has the bluntest version: its terms say you cannot withdraw funds until 30 days after the deposit date of those funds, and that the operator may require further identification before releasing funds and may limit the amount and frequency of withdrawals at its discretion.

Resolution. The third clock is the contract's own, and it is the only one a fee schedule implies. Capital in an open position is not withdrawable anywhere, by anyone, and on the venues where an outcome can be disputed the end of the event is not the end of the wait — Polymarket's own resolution documentation gives roughly two hours for an undisputed market and four to six days for a twice-disputed one, through a 24-to-48-hour debate period and a token-holder vote of about 48 hours. If your position is the one being argued about, so is your money.

The jurisdiction lock, and why close-only is the milder of the two

This is the constraint that is hardest to plan for, because it can arrive after you are funded and it is not a fee, a hold or a rail.

Two statuses look similar in a list and are not the same thing. Close-only lets you exit positions and open nothing new: the capital is released as soon as you sell. Hold to resolution does not let you exit at all — the position runs to settlement and the money is unavailable until the contract ends, which on a long-dated market can be months. The first is an inconvenience; the second is a maturity date you did not choose.

Polymarket's geographic-restrictions help page is the document that distinguishes them. Germany is the case worth knowing because it carries both answers at once: it appears in the page's list of 39 fully blocked countries, and its country-specific note — as read for this catalogue's Polymarket card on 19 September 2026 — states that existing positions must be held until market resolution to redeem shares, after which funds can be withdrawn without restrictions. Be aware of how much of that we could re-verify: on 21 September 2026 the page's country-specific notes and its close-only list are collapsed blocks that do not render to anything but a browser, so the blocked-country table above is today's reading and the Germany sentence is the card's.

Which mechanism applies to you, how it is enforced, and how fast these lists move is a page of its own — why a venue is unavailable where you are covers the four different restrictions that get called one word, and records one venue's restricted list moving twice in ten weeks. What belongs here is only the consequence: a status change reaches money you have already committed, and the honest question to ask before depositing is not whether you may trade today but what happens to an open position if the answer changes.

On-chain, where withdrawing is a different verb

The on-chain venues invert the whole problem. There is no balance to release, because there was never a balance.

Limitless states it outright: it does not hold a platform balance, and your USDC always lives in your wallet on Base. What withdraw then means depends on which of three wallets you signed up with. With an external wallet, the funds are already yours and Limitless does not need to be involved at all — moving them is an ordinary ERC-20 transfer you make from your own wallet interface. With a social login, the money sits in an embedded or smart wallet and the app's Withdraw action moves it to another address on Base, with the platform sponsoring gas. The documentation also carries the failure that costs the most: deposits and withdrawals settle on Base, and USDC sent from another chain without bridging first is not credited.

Polymarket is the longer chain, and it is three actions rather than one. First redeem: after resolution the collateral adapter burns your ERC-1155 outcome tokens, receives the released USDC.e and returns pUSD to your wallet. Then unwrap and swap: the withdrawal path takes pUSD through the Collateral Offramp and a named Uniswap v3 pool into native USDC, and the documentation warns that this pool can be exhausted, suggesting smaller amounts or waiting for a rebalance when withdrawals fail. Then bridge: you generate a destination-specific address, send pUSD to it, and the funds are bridged and swapped to your chosen token and chain. Two cautions come attached — do not pre-generate withdrawal addresses, because each is configured for one destination, and for withdrawals over 50,000 dollars break them up or use a third-party bridge to limit slippage. There is an escape hatch from the Uniswap dependency, withdrawing pUSD directly, and the documentation notes its cost: some exchanges no longer accept pUSD deposits.

Self-custody moves the failure modes rather than removing them. Myriad tells you where its private key is exported from and warns that funds sent to a wrong address cannot be recovered; Futuur's deposit page carries the same warning about mismatched networks at the two ends of a transfer, where the loss is a property of the chain rather than a vendor error. On a cash venue a wrong account number is a reversal and a support ticket. Here it is final.

Credit that was never going to leave

Promotional credit is the one item that reliably surprises people, because it is denominated in dollars and displayed next to money.

Polymarket US is explicit in one place and not in another, and the two pages are live at the same time. Its withdrawal FAQ says promo credits are trading credits, not cash, that they cannot be withdrawn including after they are used in trading and after the related position settles or is liquidated, and that only the resulting proceeds may become withdrawable — and then only after you link a payment method and make a real deposit that clears. Its refer-a-friend FAQ answers the same question in one line and says credits may be withdrawn upon position settlement or liquidation. Both were read on 21 September 2026. Where a venue's own documents disagree, the narrower reading is the one to plan around.

Futuur's terms carry the rule without the ambiguity: funds marked as Bonus cannot be withdrawn. The same terms add a play-through condition that applies to ordinary deposits too — a deposit must be traded at least once before a withdrawal can be made, and the operator reserves the right to refuse a withdrawal where the total traded is less than the last deposit. Depositing and changing your mind is not one of the available moves.

The related case is a venue whose unit of account is not money at all. Nearly half of Myriad's open listing is denominated in season points rather than a stablecoin, and points markets look identical to stablecoin markets in the interface — the check is on the market, before the position.

What it costs

Four separate charges, and only the first is ever in a fee schedule.

The rail's own fee

Two of those rows are not really rail fees and are the largest numbers in the table. PredictIt's 5% is charged on the full amount moved rather than on the gain: on a 1,000 dollar round trip that is 50 dollars whether you were right or wrong, against trading fees on the other US venues that run around 1 to 2% of a contract's payout — see what a trade actually costs for why those two percentages are not in the same unit. And Kalshi's wire threshold is not a fee at all; it is a rail that a retail-sized withdrawal cannot use.

Futuur also caps the pipe rather than pricing it: its terms set a maximum of 10,000 euro in any 24 hours and 50,000 euro in any 30 days unless a larger amount is agreed, allow only one pending withdrawal per payment method at a time, and on some methods only one request per 24 hours. A number that is not a fee still decides how long the exit takes.

The spread on the way through

This is the charge that appears in no schedule, because it is not the venue's. Polymarket's own bridge quote endpoint documents a worked example, and it is the most useful published figure on this page: 10 dollars in, 9.94 dollars out. The breakdown it returns is 2 cents of gas, a bridge fee of 0.3%, a fill cost of 0.1% and a swap impact of 0.05%, for a total impact of 0.6%, against a maximum slippage of 0.5% and a minimum received of 9.89 dollars. Estimated time, 45 seconds.

Read that against the trading fee it sits beside. Polymarket's taker fee on most categories costs 1.25% of a contract's payout at the 50-cent midpoint. A 0.6% exit, charged once on the whole balance rather than per contract, is roughly half a trade — and on a small withdrawal the fixed 2 cents of gas dominates everything else in the list. Ten withdrawals of 10 dollars are not priced like one withdrawal of 100.

The same paragraph explains why the advice for large amounts runs the other way. Over 50,000 dollars the documentation suggests splitting the withdrawal or using a third-party bridge, because the constraint stops being the fixed cost and becomes the depth of the pool you are swapping through.

Gas, and who is actually paying it

Limitless publishes the cleanest statement of this by wallet type. From an external wallet you pay gas in ETH and approve every transaction; from an embedded wallet you also pay gas in ETH, without the approval step; from a smart wallet the platform sponsors the fee and you need hold only USDC. That is a real difference in what you must own before you can be paid — a reader with USDC and no ETH in an external wallet on Base cannot move their own money until they acquire some.

Myriad takes the other approach and charges a flat 0.0085 dollars per transaction to cover chain costs, which is a rounding error on a position and is not a rounding error on a habit of small transactions.

The price of the time

The largest cost on this page usually has no line item at all. Capital sitting in a clearing hold, in a manual review queue, in a 30-day holding period or in a position that a jurisdiction rule will not let you close earns nothing while it waits.

Price it the way you would price anything else. At a 4% annual rate, 1,000 dollars locked for 30 days is about 3.29 dollars, and for six months about 20 dollars. Compare that with the 1 to 2% of payout a trade costs on the same venues and the ranking flips for anything long-dated: on a six-month contract the opportunity cost of the collateral is larger than the fee that bought it. A hold-to-resolution status turns that from an estimate into a certainty.

One exchange prices this explicitly, which is the best evidence that it is real. ForecastEx's own FAQ says contracts are fully secured by cash deposited before bids are accepted, that it invests that cash and passes 100% of the earnings back to members each month as an Incentive Coupon proportionate to each member's share of the collateral, and that members may share those earnings with their clients. Note the last clause: the obligation runs to the futures commission merchant, and whether any of it reaches you is that firm's decision, not the exchange's.

What you can do about it

Fund with the rail you want to be paid on. This is the single decision that determines everything above, and it is made in the first two minutes of an account's life, before you know it matters. On a same-source venue the first deposit chooses your exit; on Kalshi a crypto deposit is what creates the crypto exit; on an international account ACH is not on offer in either direction. If you will want dollars in a bank account, deposit from that bank account.

Withdraw a small amount before you size up. Every constraint on this page is cheap to discover with 20 dollars and expensive to discover with 2,000. A test withdrawal tells you the real arrival time, whether identity verification is triggered, whether your bank declines the payout, and — on an on-chain venue — what the quote actually takes. Do it while nothing depends on the answer.

Read the hold table, not the deposit page. The question is not how long a deposit takes to appear; it is how long until that money can leave, which is a different number on every venue and is sometimes a different number depending on which method you leave by. Kalshi publishes it as a grid of deposit method against withdrawal method. Polymarket US publishes it as processing times per funding method plus a rule that proceeds inherit the deposit's clock. Neither is on the screen where you deposit.

Ask the close-only question before the fee question. Before funding, find out whether your jurisdiction has a close-only or hold-to-resolution status on that venue, and what happens to an open position if it acquires one. Why a venue is unavailable where you are sets out where each venue's list lives and how often it moves; the point for your money is that hold-to-resolution is the expensive answer and it is not reversible by closing early.

On an on-chain venue, confirm the chain before the address. Check which chain and which token the venue settles in, bridge before you send rather than after, and take a quote before a withdrawal rather than reading the fee afterwards — Polymarket's quote endpoint returns the full breakdown, and Limitless returns the applied rate on the execution. Split anything large. Nothing here is reversible, and no support ticket recovers a transfer sent to the wrong chain.

Treat credit as a discount, never as a balance. Where a venue documents promotional credit, the documented answer is that the credit itself never leaves and only proceeds can. Where two of a venue's pages disagree — as Polymarket US's do today — plan around the stricter one, and check before you make the credit the reason for a position you would not otherwise have taken.

Put a number on the waiting. Before committing capital to a long-dated contract, work out what the collateral would earn elsewhere over the contract's life and add it to the trading fee. On a six-month position it is usually the larger of the two. ForecastEx is the one venue in the catalogue that pays a coupon on the collateral while you wait, and even there it is the broker that decides whether you see it — ask that firm directly rather than reading the exchange's rule.

Re-check on the documents, not on the news. Every figure above comes from a venue's own help centre, terms or developer documentation, read on 20 and 21 September 2026. Hold periods, withdrawal minimums, credit terms and jurisdiction statuses are all amended without release notes. The cards in prediction market venues carry each venue's rails and the date this catalogue last read them, which is the shortest route to the document that governs yours.