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.

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. There are no Polymarket fees to deposit or withdraw USDC, though an on-ramp such as Coinbase or MoonPay charges its own. Fees fund a maker rebate paid daily and a tiered taker rebate.

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 every category except crypto. Crypto is 0.07, or 1.75% at the same point, and one category is free. Polymarket US runs a different schedule — one coefficient for everything, and a maker who is paid rather than merely not charged.

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, anyone may propose an outcome by posting a bond, typically 750 pUSD. 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, and py-clob-client as the Python client. Third-party analytics on the same data live at Polymarket Analytics and Polyrama.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Nobody here has funded an account. Everything above is read from Polymarket's own terms, documentation and fee pages, on 19 September 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.