Polymarket

What it is

Polymarket is the largest prediction-market brand, and the first thing to understand about it is that the brand covers two products that share a name. This card is the international one. The American one is Polymarket US — a different operating company, a different regulator, dollars instead of a stablecoin, and an exchange rather than an oracle deciding how a market ends — and almost nothing you learn here transfers to it.

The international platform is a self-custody central limit order book running on Polygon, operated by Adventure One QSS, Inc. Collateral is pUSD, an ERC-20 backed one-for-one by USDC and enforced on-chain; outcome shares are ERC-1155 tokens minted through the Gnosis Conditional Token Framework, so one Yes plus one No always redeems for a dollar and the winning side redeems for a dollar after resolution. You trade against other users, not the house. An account is a wallet — there is no identity check in the ordinary flow.

Categories listed here include politics, sports, crypto, economics, weather, culture, technology and geopolitics.

Availability

This is the field that decides whether the rest of the card matters.

The United States is blocked. The Terms of Use, effective 11 August 2026, bar trading by anyone resident, located or incorporated in the United States and a long list of other jurisdictions, in capitals, with the sentence "THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS". Reading is explicitly still permitted — restricted users may use the content features and not the trading platform — and the live site tells a US visitor that trading is blocked and to switch to polymarket.us.

What the restriction actually is, precisely. Polymarket's own geographic-restrictions help page, last updated 14 August 2026, states that permissions are based on physical location rather than residency, so a user from a restricted country who travels can trade and a resident abroad is judged by where they are standing. It names 39 restricted countries plus the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec and the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. Three different statuses exist, and they are not the same restriction. Read them as two questions rather than as one list: whether you may open a position, and what happens to one you already hold.

• Fully blocked — no access to trading at all. This is where the United States sits, along with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil, among others.
• Close-only — Singapore, Poland, Thailand and Taiwan. Existing positions can be closed; no new ones can be opened.
• Hold to resolution — Germany. Existing positions must be held until the market resolves before funds can be withdrawn.

Germany appears twice on purpose, and the overlap is the part worth reading. It is blocked from opening anything, and unlike the close-only four it is not allowed to exit early either, so a German holder's capital is locked for the life of the contract rather than released on a sale. Blocked and close-only are answers to different questions, and a country can be given one answer to each.

VPN use to circumvent any of this is prohibited and the stated consequence is that the wallet is put into close-only mode.

In France the regulator blocks the site itself, not only the trading. Polymarket's help page, last updated 14 August 2026, lists France among the fully blocked countries. The French regulator went further: on 16 July 2026 the president of the Autorité nationale des jeux (ANJ) ordered French internet service providers to block access to the Polymarket website, according to the ANJ's own release of 17 July 2026. The release says the operator it names, Adventure One QSS Inc., had blocked financial transactions from French territory after an earlier formal notice, that the measure had in practice been circumvented, and that the site drew 578,751 visits from France in June 2026. So for a reader in France the read-only access the terms allow is cut at the network level as well. The release names what the ANJ says it will watch for: identity and location checks early and robust enough to keep players located in France from reaching the service.

Two of Polymarket's own current documents disagree, and a card that quoted only one would be wrong. The Terms of Use list names Hungary and Slovenia and the four Canadian provinces; the help-centre list names Brazil, Japan, Malta and Burundi and not Hungary or Slovenia. The Terms also delegate the authoritative list to a documentation URL that now redirects to an unrelated page. Read the help centre, and read it on the day.

There is no identity check at signup here. What exists instead is a click-through attestation that you are not a US person, not located in a restricted jurisdiction and not using a VPN, plus a reactive certification path — an ID and a proof of address in a non-restricted jurisdiction, within 14 days — used when an account is flagged. The mandatory-KYC half of the brand is Polymarket US, which is the card to read if you are American.

Pricing

No subscription. The fee is a coefficient times the number of contracts times price times one-minus-price, so the charge peaks at the 50-cent midpoint and falls to almost nothing at the extremes.

Makers are never charged. Only takers pay, and the coefficient depends on the category:

Geopolitical and world-event markets are fee-free. Fees fund a maker rebate paid daily and a tiered taker rebate, below.

The 1.25% in this card's fee field is what the 0.05 coefficient costs a taker at the 50-cent midpoint, which is the rate for sports, economics, culture, weather and other markets. Crypto is 0.07, or 1.75% at the same point; finance, politics, mentions and tech are 0.04, or 1.00%; and geopolitics is free. Polymarket US runs a different schedule — one coefficient for everything, and a maker who is paid rather than merely not charged. The prediction market fee calculator applies each category's coefficient to your own price and size, beside the same trade on the other venues.

The schedule's date, and its rounding. The fee page carries no date or version number. What dates it is Polymarket's own predictions changelog: "Fee Structure V2", which put fees on the current categories, on 30 March 2026, and the last change to the table on 10 July 2026, when the sports coefficient rose from 0.03 to 0.05 and the sports maker rebate fell from 25% to 15% of collected taker fees. The help-centre copy of the same table is dated 10 July 2026. Since the exchange upgrade of 28 April 2026 the fee is set at match time and charged in USDC rather than taken in shares. The fee page publishes one rounding rule: fees are rounded to five decimal places, the smallest fee charged is 0.00001 USDC, and anything smaller rounds to zero, so a very small fill near either extreme can pay nothing at all.

The taker rebate's tiers are published. The Taker Rebate Program page, live since 28 May 2026, ranks a taker by 30-day weighted volume: trade size times one-minus-entry-price times a category weight — 1.0 for sports; 1.3 for politics, finance, mentions and tech; 1.7 for economics, culture, weather and other; 2.3 for crypto; and 0 for geopolitics, which earns nothing because it charges nothing.

The tier page prints the rebate as a bare percentage without naming its base; the fee page calls the programme a way for takers to earn "a portion of fees" back. A tier applies to trades from the day it is reached, never backwards, is recalculated daily at midnight UTC, and pays out daily in pUSD once at least 1 dollar has accrued; a first arrival at each tier adds a one-time bonus of 10 to 25,000 dollars. Integrations trading through omnibus wallets are excluded, and the page reserves the right to change rates, thresholds and weights without notice. This card's fee field is the rate before any rebate, which is what a new account pays.

Getting a winning position into a bank account. Polymarket documents the on-chain half of the route and prices part of it; the last step is somebody else's. Read on 9 October 2026:

1. Redeem. After resolution a winning share redeems for one pUSD. No Polymarket document names a fee on redemption, and the builder documentation describes position operations sent through Polymarket's relayer as gas-free.
2. Unwrap and swap. The bridge withdrawal page says pUSD is unwrapped to USDC through the Collateral Offramp and swapped through a Uniswap v3 pool into native USDC, and that the interface enforces less than 10 basis points (0.1%) of difference in the output amount. The pool can run dry; the page then suggests smaller amounts, waiting for a rebalance, or sending pUSD itself, which some exchanges no longer accept.
3. Bridge. pUSD sent to a destination-specific address is bridged and swapped to the chosen token and chain by the bridge provider, which the changelog names as Fun.xyz. The same page says Polymarket does not charge withdrawal fees, and for anything over 50,000 dollars suggests splitting the amount or using a third-party bridge. The quote page's one worked example runs the other way — 10 USDC on Polygon into pUSD, a deposit — and returns 9.94 dollars: 0.02 dollars of gas, a line labelled "Bridge fee" of 0.3%, a fill cost of 0.1% and a swap impact of 0.05%, a total of 0.6%, against a maximum slippage of 0.5% and a minimum received of 9.89 dollars. The page says neither who collects that 0.3% nor what a withdrawal quote returns; the quote endpoint answers the second question for your own amount before you send.
4. To fiat. Polymarket's withdrawal flow ends at a wallet address, and its documents name no off-ramp of their own. The only providers they name are Coinbase and MoonPay, in the fee page's sentence that intermediaries "may charge their own fees" to move USDC in or out. On their own pages, read the same day: MoonPay's European pricing disclosure, which carries no date, gives a sell processing fee of up to 1% by bank transfer, up to 4.5% to a card and up to 3.4% by PayPal, with a minimum MoonPay fee of 3.99 euros below a threshold, a network fee on top and a spread inside the quoted price. Coinbase's fee page says cashing out may carry a fee depending on the payment method without listing one, and sets a 0.10% processing fee on net USDC-to-dollar conversion only above 5 million dollars in a rolling 30 days.

Markets & resolution

Polymarket does not resolve anything here. The Terms of Use say it plainly — all contracts displayed on the platform are resolved by the UMA optimistic oracle, and disputes run through UMA's own process. Mechanically, an outcome is proposed by posting a bond, typically 750 pUSD. Since 5 September 2025 that has been open only to addresses on a proposer whitelist wherever Polymarket applies one; Risk Labs, on UMA's side, curates the default list from past proposal accuracy. Disputing stays open to anyone. There is a two-hour challenge period. One dispute sends it to a second proposal round; a second dispute escalates to UMA's Data Verification Mechanism, a vote of UMA token holders. That vote, not Polymarket, is the final word, and there is no route from it back to the company.

The same brand resolves the other way round in America: on Polymarket US the exchange itself determines the outcome, and that determination is final. If you care about who you can appeal to, this is the field to read first — and it is the field on which the two products are least alike.

Integrations

Polymarket's public data and trading interfaces are separate products with their own audiences, and they have their own cards — Polymarket Gamma API for markets and metadata, Polymarket CLOB API for the book and order placement, Polymarket Data API for trades, wallet positions and holders, and polymarket-client as the Python client, which replaced the archived py-clob-client. Third-party analytics on the same data live at Polymarket Analytics and Polyrama.

A publisher who wants live prices on a page without writing code uses Polymarket Embeds, the venue's own iframe builder and livestream ticker, which put your affiliate code on every link.

Polymarket US has an entirely separate API, with its own keys, its own endpoints and its own SDKs; nothing written against the interfaces above reaches it.

Mobile apps are US-only. The iOS and Android apps are published for the US store and carry the Polymarket US product; no official app is listed in the international storefronts we checked, so outside the US the platform is a web application.

Limitations

• This is not the platform a US reader can use. It blocks the United States wholesale, by physical location and not by residency, and read-only is the fallback rather than an inconvenience. The American product is Polymarket US, and the two share a brand rather than an operator, a regulator, a custody model, a fee schedule or a resolution authority.
• France blocks the website, not only trading. The ANJ ordered French internet service providers to block access to Polymarket's site on 16 July 2026, so reading is cut there too.
• UMA resolution is not appealable to Polymarket. A twice-disputed market is settled by a token-holder vote. If you think a market resolved wrongly, there is no support ticket that reverses it.
• Nothing arrives at year end. There is no account in your name, so no tax form or statement is issued. A filer who needs US Form 8949 rows anyway — a US citizen living abroad, say — gets them from PolyTaxes, which builds them from a wallet's public history.
• Polymarket's own two current documents disagree about which jurisdictions are restricted, and the Terms delegate the authoritative list to a URL that no longer resolves.
• Polymarket now also runs perpetual futures, with their own documentation, fee tiers and Chainlink-based pricing. A description of the venue as prediction markets only is already out of date.
• There is no route to a bank account inside Polymarket. A withdrawal ends as a token at a wallet address; turning it into money in a bank is a separate account at an exchange or off-ramp, on that provider's fees and terms. The bridge's only published fee example is a deposit, so the real cost of a withdrawal is known only from a quote taken on the day.
• Nobody here has funded an account. Everything above is read from Polymarket's own terms, documentation and fee pages — availability on 19 September 2026, fees, rebates and the withdrawal path on 9 October 2026.

Alternatives

Polymarket US is where an American reader has to go, and Kalshi is the other exchange they will be choosing between. Limitless is the closest comparison for the on-chain half, on Base rather than Polygon, and it does not serve US traders at all. ForecastEx is the opposite end of the same category — no sports, no crypto, and interest paid on collateral while a position is held.