What happened
Polymarket has approached the CFTC about reopening its flagship prediction markets platform to U. S. users, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday morning, citing people familiar with the discussions.
The company, which runs binary event contracts on outcomes ranging from elections to Fed decisions, has been formally barred from serving U. S. residents since January 2022.
That ban was the centerpiece of a CFTC settlement in which Polymarket paid a $1. 4 million civil penalty and agreed to wind down access for American customers, after the regulator concluded the platform had been offering unregistered binary options. Since then, U.
S. users have been geofenced off the main site, with most domestic interest spilling into a separately regulated Kalshi or routed through VPNs the company says it actively blocks. The new push, per Bloomberg, would not unwind the 2022 order outright.
It would instead put the venue inside the CFTC's event-contract regime, the same framework Kalshi uses to offer regulated political and economic markets to retail. Polymarket has not formally confirmed the talks. A spokesperson declined to comment to Bloomberg, and the CFTC, as is standard, has not commented on a pending matter.
Why it matters
Prediction markets spent 2024 and 2025 quietly becoming one of the most-watched corners of crypto-adjacent finance. Polymarket alone cleared more than $3. 6 billion in notional volume on the U.
S. presidential election cycle, drawing in the kind of macro-fund and prop-desk attention that on-chain venues rarely see. All of that happened without U.