New Study Estimates 30% of Polymarket’s Trading Volume Originates From Illegal U.S. User Activity

A new analysis has revealed that nearly 30% of all trading volume on leading crypto prediction platform Polymarket comes from users based in the United States — a staggering figure, considering U.S. residents are legally barred from accessing the platform’s core unregulated offering.

The study, led by Rutgers University statistician Harry Crane, estimates U.S. users routed between $10.6 billion and $26.7 billion through Polymarket between May 2025 and the end of April 2026. To map activity across offshore prediction market platforms, Crane analyzed transactions that aligned with patterns of U.S.-based participation, and found that many of Polymarket’s highest-volume markets center on U.S. events, including national elections and domestic professional sports. U.S. trader participation is especially high in Polymarket’s sports segment, where the study estimates they account for roughly half of all activity.

Crane, who also serves on the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee (a panel that guides federal regulators on technology’s impact on markets), noted that the scale of U.S. participation has long been an open question: “We’ve always known some individual users access the platform, but we didn’t know the extent — whether it was a handful of people, or a meaningful share of total volume.” The research was commissioned and funded by the Coalition for Prediction Markets, an industry lobbying group that counts major operators including Kalshi, Coinbase, and Crypto.com as members. Polymarket is not part of the coalition, and Crane retained full editorial control over all study findings.

Polymarket is one of the world’s most popular prediction markets, allowing users to trade on outcomes ranging from NBA Finals champions and five-minute Bitcoin price fluctuations to geopolitical events like military action in Iran. It has secured formal partnerships with U.S.-based media companies including Substack and Dow Jones, as well as U.S. pro sports leagues Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.

However, Polymarket’s core crypto-native platform has been banned for U.S. users since 2022, when federal regulators ruled it operated as an unregistered derivatives exchange. In December 2025, Polymarket launched a separate, U.S.-licensed mobile prediction market called Polymarket US. Pew Research data puts Polymarket US’s April 2026 trading volume at roughly $1.6 billion, compared to $9 billion for the unregulated offshore core platform — making the banned original offering by far the larger of the two marketplaces.

To evade geoblocking, U.S. users typically mask their location via virtual private networks (VPNs), a practice explicitly prohibited by Polymarket’s terms of service. This hidden activity has made quantifying U.S. participation extremely difficult, and Crane’s study marks the first major public attempt to produce a credible estimate.

Without a way to directly track the geographic origin of VPN-masked traffic, Crane’s methodology relies on behavioral differences between U.S. and international traders: he analyzed factors including the time of day trades are executed, and the types of markets users participate in (for example, U.S. traders are far more likely to engage with U.S. sports markets than global peers). While the resulting estimate is imprecise, it offers the clearest snapshot to date of surreptitious U.S. participation on the platform.

“It’s not perfect, but I think it provides a reasonable estimate of the fraction of volume attributable to offshore trading by U.S. users,” said Charles Martineau, an associate professor of finance at University of Toronto Scarborough who has studied Polymarket trading behavior. “Using these indirect proxies is common and widely accepted in finance research.”

Polymarket declined to comment on the study’s findings. The CFTC does not normally hold regulatory authority over offshore prediction markets, but agency chairman Michael Selig told WIRED last month he is willing to use extraterritorial jurisdiction to target bad actors on a case-by-case basis. It remains unclear whether the agency would pursue action against ordinary U.S. users who skirted the ban via VPN without other misconduct, and the CFTC did not respond to requests for comment on the new study.

The risks of unregulated U.S. participation on Polymarket were highlighted in a high-profile case earlier this year: in April 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice charged a U.S. special forces soldier, alleging he used classified information about the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to earn roughly $400,000 in profits from Polymarket trades.

Looking forward, the study projects U.S. trading volume on the unregulated core platform will continue to grow rapidly if Polymarket maintains its current market share, with annual volume projected to hit $133 billion by 2030.