Polymarket

Polymarket, read carefully and in full.

Polymarket is the most discussed name in prediction markets, and for a simple reason. By trading volume and by the sheer number of live questions, it has been the largest venue in the category for several years, and the breadth of what it lists is unlike anything else we track. What has changed, and what makes this page worth rewriting in June 2026, is that Polymarket now reaches traders in the United States again, this time through a regulated structure rather than the offshore route that defined its first chapter. The rest of this review explains, in plain terms, what the venue is, how the US route came to exist, what it costs, how a market actually resolves, and what a careful reader should check before deciding anything.

What Polymarket is, in plain terms

Polymarket is an exchange for event contracts. An event contract is a simple instrument: it pays one dollar if a stated outcome happens and zero if it does not. Because the payout is fixed at a dollar, the price of the contract sits somewhere between one cent and 99 cents, and that price reads directly as a probability. A market trading at 62 cents is the crowd pricing the outcome at roughly a 62 percent chance. Nothing about that price is a promise. It is the running balance of what buyers will pay and what sellers will accept, and it moves whenever new money takes a side.

The word exchange matters here. Polymarket does not set the odds and does not take the opposite side of your position. It matches buyers with sellers through an order book, the same basic machinery a stock exchange uses, and it earns from fees on trading rather than from your losses. There is no house in the sportsbook sense. When you buy a yes contract, someone else is selling it to you, and the two of you have simply disagreed on the price. That structure is the single most important thing to understand about the venue, because it shapes everything from how prices behave to how the regulators classify it.

In its original form, Polymarket was built on public blockchain infrastructure. Trades settled in USDC, a dollar referenced stablecoin, and balances lived in a wallet the user controlled rather than in a company account. That onchain design is still how the international venue operates, and it is why Polymarket grew up outside the traditional brokerage world. It also explains the friction that long kept it away from US users, which we turn to next.

The regulatory turn, and how the US route was built

For most of its life Polymarket did not serve customers in the United States. After a settlement with the CFTC in early 2022, US residents were blocked from trading on the platform. The return came through a deliberate, and expensive, route into the regulated system rather than a negotiated reopening of the old offshore product.

In July 2025 Polymarket closed the acquisition of the holding company behind a CFTC licensed derivatives exchange, QCX, LLC, and an associated clearinghouse, QC Clearing LLC, together referred to as QCEX, for 112 million dollars, per Polymarket's own announcement carried on PR Newswire in July 2025. Buying an already licensed exchange and clearinghouse gave Polymarket the regulatory standing it could not get for the offshore venue. The CFTC then approved an amended order of designation in November 2025, which allowed Polymarket to operate an intermediated trading platform under the full set of requirements that apply to federally regulated US exchanges, per the CFTC order of designation and reporting on the regulatoryoversight.com site dated December 2025.

The US relaunch began on 3 December 2025, with a mobile app and the new regulated structure, per contemporaneous reporting. Around the same period, reporting indicated a large strategic investment into Polymarket from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, of up to roughly 2 billion dollars. We treat the precise investment figure as reported rather than independently confirmed, and a reader who cares about that detail should look to the companies' own filings.

The word intermediated is the key to how US access works, and it is a real change from the old model. Rather than connecting a self custody wallet straight to an order book, the US structure routes orders through registered intermediaries, the kind of firms that already handle custody, reporting and customer protections in regulated markets. For a US trader that means a more familiar brokerage style experience and the protections that come with a designated contract market, in exchange for the extra onboarding step of opening and verifying an account inside that structure.

What it costs to trade

Costs on Polymarket now come in two flavours, because there are effectively two venues. On the international onchain platform, trading costs have historically been low, with the main friction being the small network costs of moving funds on and off chain. The US exchange, by contrast, publishes a clear fee schedule, and that is what a US reader should plan around.

Per the Polymarket US fee schedule, effective from 3pm Eastern on 3 April 2026, fees follow a symmetric formula rather than a flat percentage. The fee on a trade equals a coefficient multiplied by the number of contracts, multiplied by the price, multiplied by one minus the price. The taker coefficient is 0.05 and the maker rebate coefficient is minus 0.0125, which is a quarter of the taker fee returned to the resting order. Because the price times one minus price term is largest at a 50 cent price and smallest at the extremes, the fee is highest on coin flip markets and shrinks toward zero as a market approaches one cent or 99 cents. The taker fee caps at about 1.25 dollars per 100 contracts at a 50 cent price, and the maker rebate caps near 31 cents per 100 contracts at the same price.

The table below reproduces representative rows from that published schedule so you can see the shape of it. It is the original fee data as Polymarket lists it, not an estimate, and we will refresh it on our weekly cycle.

Methodology: figures taken directly from the Polymarket US fee schedule at docs.polymarket.us/fees, effective 3 April 2026, captured by Prediction Market Index in June 2026. Values use the published symmetric formula and banker's rounding. Schedules change, so confirm the live page before trading.

The practical reading is that, for a US trader, the cost of a round trip is modest but not zero, and it bites most on the markets closest to even odds. A maker who posts a resting limit order pays no taker fee and instead collects a rebate, which rewards patience over hitting the market. None of this is advice to trade; it is the arithmetic you should run before you do.

A worked example of the cost

To make the formula concrete, take the published examples on the schedule. If you buy 1,000 contracts at a 10 cent price as the taker, the fee is 0.05 multiplied by 1,000 multiplied by 0.10 multiplied by 0.90, which is 4.50 dollars on a 100 dollar position. Buy the same 1,000 contracts at a 50 cent price and the taker fee rises to 12.50 dollars, because the uncertainty term is at its largest. Sell 1,000 contracts at a 90 cent price as the taker and the fee falls back to 4.50 dollars. The lesson is not that one price is better than another, it is that the cost of trading is not flat, and a careful trader prices it in. If you want to see how that compares with the other large regulated US venue, our Kalshi versus Polymarket comparison sets the two fee models side by side, and our cross platform fees dataset tracks costs across every venue we cover.

How a market settles, and where your money sits

Every Polymarket question resolves to yes or no against a stated resolution source. When the outcome is known, winning contracts are each worth one dollar and losing contracts are worth zero, and balances update accordingly. The detail that rewards a careful reader is the resolution source. Two markets that sound the same can resolve differently depending on which authority or data feed they name and exactly how the question is worded. Reading the resolution criteria for an individual market, before trading it, is the habit that separates people who get surprised from people who do not.

On custody, the two routes differ. The international onchain venue holds value in USDC in a wallet the user controls, which means the user carries the responsibilities of self custody, including keeping access credentials safe. The US route follows the custody arrangements of the regulated intermediary and clearinghouse, which is closer to how a brokerage account works. Neither arrangement removes market risk. A regulated custodian protects the mechanics of holding and moving your funds; it does nothing to change whether your prediction was right.

The menu, and why liquidity is the real edge

Polymarket's defining strength is range. It lists politics, world events, economics, crypto, sports and culture, and within each it often runs many related questions at once. For the biggest events, that breadth comes with the other thing that matters, which is liquidity. Deep liquidity means you can enter and exit a position near the displayed price without moving it much, and on the headline markets Polymarket generally has more of it than anyone else in the set. On smaller or more obscure questions, liquidity thins out, spreads widen, and the displayed price becomes a weaker signal. The catalogue a US trader sees follows what the regulated US structure lists, which can differ from the full international menu, so do not assume every market you have read about elsewhere is available to you.

Where Polymarket sits among the sixteen venues

We track sixteen prediction market and event contract platforms, and Polymarket occupies a specific place within that set. On raw breadth and liquidity it leads, especially on politics and world events, where its markets are the ones most often quoted elsewhere. On US regulatory history it is newer than Kalshi, which operated as a CFTC designated contract market for US customers throughout the period Polymarket was excluded, so a reader who weights length of regulated US operation above all else will rank the two differently than one who weights menu size. Against the smaller and more specialised venues, Polymarket is the generalist that does most things at scale rather than one thing narrowly. None of that makes it the right venue for any particular person. The right venue depends on what you want to trade, where you live, and how much the regulatory track record matters to you, which is exactly why we publish the full scored set rather than crown a single winner.

Who can actually use it

As of June 2026, Polymarket offers a route for verified traders in the United States through the regulated intermediated structure, and it remains widely available offshore subject to local law. Eligibility is not the same as availability in the abstract. Your own access depends on your age, on identity verification, and on your state, and those rules can change. Outside the United States, availability varies country by country, and for the onchain venue your local law governs whether you may participate at all. The honest summary is that Polymarket is more reachable to a US reader than at any point since 2022, and that you should still confirm your specific eligibility on the day rather than rely on a general statement.

A short history that explains the present

Polymarket launched in 2020 as an onchain venue and grew quickly through several high attention news cycles, where its election and event markets were widely quoted by journalists as a real time read on probabilities. That visibility cut both ways. In January 2022 it reached a settlement with the CFTC that required it to wind down access for customers in the United States, which is why for several years the prices everyone discussed were ones most US readers could not actually trade. The platform kept growing internationally, and by 2024 and into 2025 it had become the reference venue for prediction market data by volume.

The 2025 strategy reads, in hindsight, as a single coherent plan to come back inside the rules rather than around them. Acquiring an already licensed exchange and clearinghouse, securing the amended order of designation, taking on a large strategic investment, and shipping a US app within the same window all point in one direction. Whether that plan delivers a US product as deep and as broad as the international one is the open question, and it is the thing we will keep watching on this page. The early signals are that the headline markets travel well, while the long tail of niche questions is thinner on the regulated side.

For users outside the United States, the move to a regulated US structure changed little about day to day access, since the international onchain venue continued to operate on its own terms. The practical effect of the 2025 changes was mostly felt by US readers, who went from watching prices they could not trade to having a compliant way to participate, subject to their own eligibility. That is a real shift in who the platform serves, and it is the single biggest reason this profile needed a full rewrite rather than a light edit.

How to read a market before you trade it

If you take one practical habit from this page, make it this. Before you act on any single market, read three things. First, the exact question and its resolution source, because the wording decides what actually pays. Second, the order book or the displayed liquidity, because a tempting price on a thin market can cost you more to enter and exit than the edge you think you have. Third, the time to resolution, because money tied up in a contract that settles months from now carries an opportunity cost that the headline price does not show. None of those three is a tip or a prediction. They are the basic checks that turn a price you saw into a decision you understand.

It is also worth being honest about what a prediction market price is good for and what it is not. A liquid Polymarket price is a useful, current estimate of how a crowd with money at stake views an outcome, and that is genuinely informative. It is not a guarantee, it is not insider knowledge, and it is not a substitute for your own reading of the situation. Treat it as one well informed opinion that happens to be expressed in numbers, and you will use it well. Treat it as a certainty, and the market will eventually remind you that it never was one.

The honest risks

A regulated wrapper is a meaningful improvement, and it is also easy to overread. The clearest risks are the ordinary ones. You can lose money, including your whole stake on a given contract, because an outcome you priced as likely simply does not happen. Prices can move fast around news, and a market that looked settled can swing. On thinner markets the spread itself is a cost. Resolution disputes, while uncommon on the large markets, do occur, and the wording of the resolution source is where they live. And the structural newness of the US route means some operational details, fees included, can change as the venue matures. We mark these as the genuine uncertainties they are rather than smoothing them over.