U.S. wallets drive $571 million in Polymarket political trading despite ban

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U.S. wallets drive Polymarket trading

Highlights

U.S.-linked wallets traded $571 million in notional value on Polymarket political markets in the past year, surpassing Hong Kong's $422 million, despite platform restrictions.
Geopolitical contracts accounted for 46% of U.S. trading volume versus 36% platform-wide, with five of the 12 top U.S. markets tied to Iran war bets.
U.S. wallets backed winning outcomes on 81.9% of resolved markets, nearly matching the 80.3% success rate of non-U.S. users, with similar reported returns.

Allium data points to persistent U.S. access

As reported by CoinDesk, citing Allium, wallets tied to the U.S. trade $571 million in notional value across Polymarket's political markets over the past year, more than any other country and ahead of Hong Kong's $422 million. The firm says Polymarket blocks U.S. users by IP address because it cannot legally serve them, but that restriction does not prevent access when users already have a crypto wallet and stablecoins.

Allium says its country tags come from wallets' onchain behavior rather than IP addresses, meaning a VPN can mask location from the platform but does not necessarily hide a U.S.-linked wallet in the data. The firm can tie only about 6% of Polymarket's political-market wallets to a country, so it says the figures should be read as directional rather than exact.

Polymarket does not immediately respond to a request for comment ahead of U.S. market hours. The report suggests blocking access does not end U.S. participation, but instead leaves a large share of political trading visible onchain while remaining outside U.S. oversight.

Geopolitical contracts draw the strongest U.S. demand

American-linked trading leans more heavily toward geopolitics than the platform overall. Geopolitics makes up 46% of U.S. notional volume against 36% for Polymarket as a whole, while elections account for 16% of U.S. volume versus 32% platform-wide.

Five of the 12 biggest markets for the U.S. cohort are bets on the Iran war, while the single largest market, at $20.8 million, is a novelty contract on whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would wear a suit. Those are broadly the types of markets that regulated U.S. venues such as Kalshi and Polymarket's compliant U.S. arm generally do not carry, as they focus more on economic data, rate decisions and elections.

The data does not indicate that U.S. traders hold a meaningful predictive edge. On resolved markets, U.S. wallets back the winner 81.9% of the time against 80.3% for all other users, and reported returns are nearly identical even though Americans at one point place 53% of their volume on a U.S. invasion of Iran when the rest of the market sits at 26%.

Our earlier article on tokenization’s growing role in financial market plumbing explained how blockchain-based ledgers and smart contracts are being adopted to cut reconciliation costs and speed up settlement for traditional assets. It highlighted institutional milestones such as JPMorgan’s Kinexys processing trillions in value, planned DTCC tokenization of U.S. Treasuries, and regulatory steps toward tokenized stock trading—signaling deeper integration of onchain rails into mainstream finance.

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