Americans Are Trading Billions of Dollars on Illegal Polymarket Offshore Platforms

About 30 percent cha sales volume on Polimamarket they come from the United States, according to a new study – a very surprising number, considering that none of the people are allowed to use it crypto– platform.

The study, conducted by Rutgers University statistician Harry Crane, estimates that US consumers spent between $10.6 and $26.7 billion through Polymarket. To investigate the platform’s performance, Crane looked at what appeared to be US trade on offshore market prediction platforms from May 2025 to the end of April 2026. He found that most of the top markets on Polymarket were US-centric, including those covering US elections and sporting events. Traders from the US appeared to be participating in the Polymarket game directly at the highest prices; The survey is said to have captured almost half of the transactions in these markets.

“It’s known there are people out there, but what’s not known is how many, whether it’s one or 10 or a fraction,” says Crane, who is also a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Innovation Advisory Committee, a group that provides guidance to government regulators on how technology affects markets. The Coalition for Prediction Markets, a lobbying group on behalf of the industry, commissioned and paid for the research, although Crane retained leadership. Kalshi, Coinbase, Crypto.com, and other major market players are members of this group. Polymarket is not.

Polymarket is one of the world’s largest prediction markets, allowing customers to trade futures ranging from the NBA Finals winner to the price of bitcoin in five-minute increments to the war in Iran. It has partnered with US media companies such as Substack and Dow Jones, as well as American sports players such as Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.

But the main crypto-based platform Polymarket has been banned in the US since 2022, when government regulators discovered that it had been operating as an unregistered advertising platform. From December 2025, Polymarket he has worked an alternative prediction market available on a mobile app licensed in the US, called Polymarket US. According to report from Pew Research, the trading volume of Polymarket US in April 2026 reached about $1.6 billion, while the initial crypto platform hit about $9 billion, making it the largest market.

To get around the digital blockade, US traders are thought to hide their location to access Polymarket’s website, often using private networks to hide their country. (Terms of service of Polymarket he forbids using VPNs.) Because of this, calculating the size of the market is difficult, and this is the first big attempt to give an estimate.

In the absence of reliable means of directly observing the location of traffic, Crane found a method that assumes that US traders have different behavior compared to their international counterparts, by looking at the time when the trade was made, the markets in which the trade was made (for example, US traders are more interested in sporting events from the US than their international counterparts). The resulting estimate is therefore imprecise, but still provides a very good picture of how many US users are participating in the underground. “It’s not perfect, but I think it gives a reasonable estimate of the amount of money that is generated by the coastal trade,” says University of Toronto Scarborough associate professor of economics Charles Martineau, who has studied the Polymarket trade. “But the use of these indirect proxies is common in economic research.”

Polymarket declined to comment.

The CFTC generally does not have jurisdiction over offshore prediction markets, but the agency’s chairman, Michael Selig, does he told WIRED last month that he is willing to use extraterritorial jurisdiction to catch criminals on criminal and criminal grounds. It’s unclear whether the agency will go after US merchants who use VPNs to circumvent the ban, but it does follow the rules. The CFTC did not respond to requests for comment.

In April there was a high-profile example of someone in the United States doing business on Polymarket: the Department of Justice. a case a special forces officer for using information about the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to extort $400,000 from Polymarket sales.

The research shows that US-based services will continue to thrive in this space if the Polymarket crypto platform maintains its market share. It estimates that US trade could reach $133 billion by 2030.