New Study Estimates 30% of Polymarket’s Trading Volume Comes From Illegal U.S. Access

A landmark new analysis has found that roughly 30 percent of all trading activity on major crypto prediction platform Polymarket originates from users based in the United States — a staggering figure, given that U.S. users are legally barred from accessing the platform’s core offshore service.

Conducted by Harry Crane, a statistician at Rutgers University and a sitting member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Innovation Advisory Committee, the study estimates that U.S. users moved between $10.6 billion and $26.7 billion through Polymarket’s unregulated platform over the 12-month study window, which ran from May 2025 to the end of April 2026. Crane tracked activity by analyzing transaction patterns that aligned with U.S.-based participation across offshore prediction markets, and found that many of Polymarket’s highest-volume markets center on U.S.-focused events, including federal elections and domestic professional sports. U.S. participation is especially pronounced on the platform’s sports vertical, where Crane estimates American traders account for roughly half of all activity.

“We’ve long known that some U.S. users were accessing the platform, but we had no idea of the true scale — whether it was a handful of power users or a meaningful share of overall volume,” Crane said, noting his committee provides guidance to federal regulators on how technology shapes market activity.

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 among its members. Polymarket is not a member of the coalition, and Crane retained full independent editorial control over all study findings and methodology.

As one of the world’s most popular prediction markets, Polymarket allows users to trade contracts tied to nearly any public event, from the winner of the NBA Finals and five-minute Bitcoin price swings to military developments in Iran. It has launched public partnerships with major U.S. media outlets including Substack and Dow Jones, as well as U.S. pro sports leagues Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.

Polymarket’s core crypto-based platform has been banned for U.S. users since 2022, when federal regulators ruled it operated as an unregistered derivatives trading platform in violation of U.S. law. In December 2025, the company launched a separate, U.S.-licensed prediction market mobile app branded Polymarket US to serve domestic users. Data from Pew Research shows that in April 2026, the legal U.S. app recorded roughly $1.6 billion in trading volume, compared to $9 billion on the original offshore crypto platform — making the banned service far larger than its regulated domestic counterpart.

U.S. users typically evade Polymarket’s geoblocking rules by using virtual private networks (VPNs) to mask their physical location, a practice explicitly prohibited by the platform’s terms of service. This obfuscation has made it impossible to directly measure the scale of U.S. participation, making this study the first major public effort to produce a credible estimate.

Without access to direct geographic data on site traffic, Crane built a methodology that leverages distinct behavioral patterns between U.S. and international traders: he analyzed factors like the time of day trades were executed and the types of markets users participated in (for example, U.S. users are far more likely to trade on U.S. domestic sports than global users). While the resulting estimate is not perfectly precise, it offers the clearest snapshot to date of how many U.S. users are accessing the platform illegally.

“It’s not perfect, but it provides a reasonable estimate of the share of volume tied to offshore trading by U.S. users,” said Charles Martineau, an associate professor of finance at University of Toronto Scarborough who has researched Polymarket trading patterns and was not involved in the study. “Using these indirect proxies is standard, accepted practice in finance research.”

Polymarket declined to provide comment on the study’s findings when reached. While the CFTC generally does not have regulatory authority over offshore prediction platforms, agency chairman Michael Selig told WIRED last month that the commission is willing to use extraterritorial jurisdiction to pursue bad actors on a case-by-case basis. It remains unclear whether the agency would pursue enforcement action against ordinary U.S. users who only skirted the ban via VPN and did not engage in other illegal activity. The CFTC also did not respond to requests for comment.

A high-profile case from April 2026 highlighted the regulatory risks of unregulated U.S. activity on the platform: the U.S. Department of Justice charged a U.S. special forces soldier with insider trading, alleging he used classified information about the impending capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to earn roughly $400,000 in profits from Polymarket trades.

The study projects that U.S. activity on Polymarket’s offshore crypto platform will continue to grow rapidly if the platform retains its current market share, with total annual U.S. trading volume on the illegal platform estimated to hit $133 billion by 2030.