Polymarket Approaches CFTC to Lift Four-Year Ban on U.S. Users

Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets in operation, has reportedly approached the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission about lifting a four-year ban on American users of its main on-chain exchange. If cleared by the commission, Polymarket's main on-chain exchange would open to American users for the first time since the company's 2022 settlement. Bloomberg was first to report on the talks.

The 2022 enforcement targeted Polymarket's parent company, Blockratize Inc., for running an unregistered platform that let users trade contracts on real-world outcomes. The company paid a $1.4 million penalty, agreed to wind down those markets, and barred U.S. residents from its main exchange.

Three years later, the prediction market industry has surged into the financial mainstream, and the same agency that pushed Polymarket out is now weighing whether to let back in the company's main exchange, which settles trades in stablecoins on the Polygon blockchain.

In November last year, the CFTC cleared a separate U.S. product routed through brokerages, built on the company's $112 million acquisition of regulated exchange QCX. That domestic platform, Polymarket US, has remained in beta with limited sports-focused trading.

Since then, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has spent the year publicly carrying water for prediction markets, in court and out. In February, Selig vowed to take states to court if they tried to regulate prediction markets, with the CFTC amicus brief backing Crypto.com. A month later, the agency issued a staff advisory on event-contract compliance and opened a notice, inviting public comment on how the sector should be governed.

A fragile precedent? Earlier this month, Selig warned that pushing prediction markets offshore could lead to FTX-style "implosions," and said platforms must register and trade under U.S. rules.

Now, with four of five commissioner seats vacant, the decision rests with Selig alone.

"Power concentrated within the CFTC sets a fragile precedent," Dominick John, analyst at Zeus Research, told Decrypt, warning that one commissioner's conviction could push legitimacy for on-chain prediction markets "without broad consensus." Such a centralization could "sharpen uncertainty" and increase the likelihood of reversals which could then weaken policy, he added.

If Polymarket's main exchange does reopen to U.S. users, retail traders stand to gain easier access and deeper liquidity, though the trade-off is "tighter regulated oversight that pulls prediction markets closer to TradFi," John added.

"A USDC-collateralised exchange settling on Polygon could become the first crypto-native venue operating inside the U.S. federal derivatives perimeter," Julian Tuerling, product and research lead at market intelligence firm xⁿ Research, told Decrypt. If it pushes through, this could mean the resolution of a years-long argument over whether on-chain infrastructure can sit inside traditional regulatory frameworks, he added.

A user base skewed toward crypto natives would start absorbing a cohort that expects "the experience of a Robinhood or a Draftkings," Tuerling said, with Polymarket forced to decide how much of its on-chain texture to preserve and how much to abstract away.

"Lifting the 2022 ban is not housekeeping," Yuriy Brisov, partner at Digital & Analogue Partners, told Decrypt, warning that a "future Commission, with the missing seats restored, can reopen anything Selig signs alone." If done soon, the decision would land amid an open jurisdictional fight, and an approval would mean "the agency picking the winner before the courts have ruled," Brisov said.

For U.S. users, "the clunky route disappears," Brisov said, eliminating the underused domestic platform and the VPN workaround that drew federal charges in the Maduro insider-trading case.