Polymarket US Set to Outperform Its Offshore Progenitor
In April 2026, Polymarket International processed about $9 billion in trades. Its regulated US platform managed $1.3 billion.
A 7:1 ratio in favor of the offshore product that US users are not supposed to be accessing. By late June, during the World Cup, Polymarket US was processing more than $200 million per day. That is a fourfold increase from mid-May’s $50 million daily.
The gap between the US and offshore is compressing fast, and US volume may be on the verge of surpassing international volume, which is now a real, near-term possibility rather than a distant projection.
That trajectory raises questions worth examining separately.
Is the Prediction Market Audience Actually the Crypto Audience?
The conventional assumption has been that prediction markets and crypto are tapping into the same demographic. Both attract technically sophisticated users comfortable with novel financial products. Both skew young and male. Polymarket’s original architecture, settling on Polygon using USDC, reinforced that assumption. To use it, you needed a crypto wallet.
Polymarket US broke that requirement. It accepts fiat deposits directly. The waitlist was dropped six weeks ago and the mobile app opened to mainstream users. Within weeks, daily volume quadrupled.
That growth rate suggests fiat access unlocked a much larger audience than the crypto-native base. The constraint was not interest; it was onboarding friction. Once Polymarket US removed the requirement to understand wallets, stablecoins, and self-custody, a larger population of users who had been excluded by complexity rather than by preference entered the market.
This matters for how the industry thinks about its total addressable market. If the ceiling for prediction markets depends primarily on the crypto-native population, the industry is smaller than current growth implies. If the ceiling is the entire population of people who bet on sports, follow politics, and track economic events, it is much larger. The Polymarket US fiat experiment is providing early evidence for the second scenario.
Are Prediction Markets Making the Sportsbook Marketing Mistake?
Regulated prediction market volume jumped 866% from 2024 to 2025, compared to 179% offshore. That growth has been accompanied by aggressive marketing spend, bonuses, influencer campaigns, and media partnerships. The On3 deal announced this week is one example. The Polymarket-Betr partnership announced earlier this year is another. The Kalshi influencer program that generated controversy during the LA mayoral race is a third.
US sportsbooks grew explosively through the same playbook after PASPA. Then they hit a wall as Customer acquisition costs shot up. Bonus offers created churn rather than loyalty, and operators discovered they had bought revenue instead of building it. Profitability required cutting promotional spending, which caused growth to stall.
Bernstein projected in April that prediction market total volume could approach $1 trillion by 2030 at an 80% compound annual growth rate. That projection assumes the current growth rate is organic rather than marketing-driven. If it is primarily marketing-driven, the sportsbook pattern may repeat. The question is whether prediction markets can convert trial users into habitual traders more efficiently than sportsbooks converted bonus seekers into loyal bettors. The early fiat conversion data is encouraging. The longer-term retention picture is too early to read.
With Regulation Stymied For Now, Growth Continues to Boom
The most counterintuitive element of the Polymarket story is the relationship between regulation and growth. The conventional trade-off in every offshore-versus-regulated market is that regulation constrains what you can offer. An offshore exchange can list anything, and a regulated one cannot.
In prediction markets, the CFTC has not behaved like a conventional regulator. It has sued states that tried to restrict the platforms. It also approved Bitcoin perpetual contracts overnight in a fairly controversial style. The CFTC has continuously championed Kalshi’s preemption argument in federal courts at public expense. The rubber stamp of CFTC legitimacy has come with remarkably few restrictions, at least compared to what state-licensed sportsbooks face.
The CFTC and DOJ dropped their investigation into Polymarket without charges in July. The company now operates as a DCM and DCO under CFTC oversight. That regulatory status has provided legal cover, institutional credibility, and government lawyers arguing on its behalf in federal court. The cost so far: a $112 million acquisition to obtain the license and whatever compliance overhead the regulated structure requires.
For any rational operator evaluating whether to stay offshore or seek CFTC licensing, the Polymarket US trajectory provides a clear data point. The offshore product retained its liquidity advantage for months, but that advantage is now evaporating. The fiat onboarding, the media deals, the institutional partnerships, the Robinhood integrations- none of those are available to an offshore platform. The regulated structure unlocked a distribution ecosystem the offshore product could not access.
The original assumption that sophisticated crypto-native traders preferred the offshore product because of its deeper liquidity and broader contract variety may have been correct in 2024. As of June 2026, Polymarket US annualized revenue hit $1 billion. The audience that arrived via fiat deposit is not the audience that arrived via Polygon wallet. It is a different, larger group, and it is growing faster by the day.
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