Talk is cheap — but Polymarket lets you put your money where your mouth is. Nearly four years after being shut down by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the online betting company that allows you to stake money on future events has become CFTC-compliant and relaunched for U.S. residents at the end of 2025.
Not everybody is thrilled about Polymarket’s return. Commentators across the political spectrum have warned that betting, on sports or on anything, can cause financial and psychological harm, especially for those with a history of addiction. It’s prudent to abstain from speculating with money you can’t afford to lose, but Americans should still welcome Polymarket’s comeback.
Shayne Coplan, an early ethereum investor and self-described cypherpunk, founded Polymarket in June 2020, when he was just 22 years old. The platform uses blockchain-backed smart contracts to operate “event markets” — futures-style markets where users bet on whether something will or will not happen. As Coplan has said, Polymarket “harness[es] the power of free markets to demystify the real world events that matter most to you” by using market prices to aggregate and transmit widely distributed knowledge — turning individual hunches into public information about the suspected likelihood of future events.
Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Polymarket’s monthly trading volume hit $25.9 million. Nobody can move that much money without catching the attention of the government. The CFTC launched an investigation in October 2021. By January 2022, Polymarket had settled the CFTC’s charges — facilitating event markets without registering with the CFTC — by paying a civil penalty of $1.4 million and barring U.S. residents from the platform.
During its nearly three-year U.S. hiatus, Polymarket grew into the world’s largest prediction market, facilitating over $3 billion in monthly trades by October 2025. That same month, Intercontinental Exchange announced plans to invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket after the company acquired a CFTC-registered contract market and clearinghouse in September.
