Polymarket is back in the US — this time with the regulator's blessing

Polymarket, the prediction market platform once forced out of the United States by federal regulators, is trading with American users again — legally, this time, and under the watch of the agency that once fined it.

The company shut its doors to US customers in 2022 after settling with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for $1.4 million over claims it had been offering unregistered derivatives contracts. That settlement didn't end the scrutiny. In late 2024, federal agents raided the Manhattan home of Polymarket's founder and chief executive, Shayne Coplan, investigating whether the platform had quietly kept serving US users in breach of the ban. CoinDesk reported at the time that Americans could, in fact, still access the site.

The case against Coplan didn't survive a change in administration. Prosecutors dropped it roughly seven months later, and by July 2025, both the Department of Justice and the CFTC had formally closed their investigations without further charges.

That cleared the way for what Polymarket had reportedly been planning for months: a $112 million acquisition of QCX and QC Clearing — together known as QCEX — a derivatives exchange and clearinghouse that already held a CFTC license. Rather than reapply for approval from scratch, Polymarket bought a company that already had it.

"Polymarket is the largest prediction market globally and has become synonymous with understanding the probability of current events," Coplan said when the deal closed. "Demand is greater than ever — not just in user growth and trading volume, but in how mainstream audiences are turning to Polymarket to separate signal from noise, bias, and speculation."

The CFTC granted QCX a no-action letter in September 2025, easing certain reporting requirements, and by November had approved Polymarket's US entity to operate as a full Designated Contract Market. The regulated American platform operates separately from Polymarket's original international exchange: the US version settles trades in dollars and falls under the CFTC's oversight framework. In contrast, the offshore platform continues to run on the Polygon blockchain using the USDC stablecoin and remains off-limits to US IP addresses.

In December 2025, Polymarket pushed the relaunch further with a mobile app letting US users bet real money on sports outcomes under CFTC supervision — the clearest sign yet that the company intends to compete directly for retail users, not just position itself as a niche political-betting site.

The numbers suggest the bet is paying off, at least so far. Polymarket's US platform handled more than $3.5 billion in trading volume in June 2026, up from $1.77 billion the month before, according to industry data. The international exchange, meanwhile, set its own monthly record of $10.8 billion, boosted by trading tied to the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Still, the comeback hasn't been clean. A Wall Street Journal investigation published in June found that Polymarket and a marketing partner had paid content creators to post videos showing fabricated trading profits, and that some of the paid content discussed how to exploit inside information on the platform. Separately, state regulators have started pushing back: Nevada's Gaming Control Board filed a civil complaint in January arguing prediction markets amount to unlicensed sports betting under state law, leaning on a similar ruling against rival Kalshi in Massachusetts. The dispute — whether federal commodities law overrides state gambling law — is still working its way through the courts.

That regulatory patchwork is the backdrop for Polymarket's rivalry with Kalshi, which stayed compliant and kept operating in the US throughout Polymarket's absence. Kalshi built a significant lead during those years, and the two companies are now competing head-on for the same pool of traders, media partnerships, and regulatory goodwill. Polymarket has been spending heavily on visibility — deals with Major League Baseball, CNBC and CNN among them — while also stocking its compliance team with former DOJ and FBI officials, an unusually direct signal that it's trying to look like a company regulators can trust.

Whether that's enough will depend less on marketing than on execution: keeping the platform clean of the manipulation and insider-trading concerns that have already drawn scrutiny, and surviving the state-level legal fights that could yet complicate its return.