Polymarket’s $571M Secret: How US Volume Defies Geoblocks
In 1920, the United States banned alcohol nationwide. The thirst didn’t disappear; it just moved behind unmarked doors and a password. A century later, a similar experiment is playing out on the blockchain. Regulators told Americans they couldn’t touch Polymarket’s political markets. The demand didn’t disappear either: it just moved behind a VPN.
According to a new report from onchain data firm Allium, US-linked wallets traded $571 million in notional value across Polymarket‘s political markets over the past year: more than any other country, ahead of Hong Kong’s $422 million.
The United States, officially barred from the platform since 2022, turned out to be its single largest political audience anyway.
A Ban With No Bouncer at the Door
Polymarket cannot legally serve US residents. That’s the price of a 2022 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which fined the platform $1.4 million and forced it to shut down noncompliant markets for Americans. Polymarket‘s own rulebook lists dozens of blocked countries and tells users not to route around it with a VPN.
The trouble is that a geographic block was built for a world with banks and passports, and crypto has neither. Polymarket runs on a wallet and stablecoins. There’s no account for a regulator to freeze, no card payment for a bank to decline. A VPN plus a wallet someone already owns is the entire toolkit needed to walk back in, which explains why Allium’s data highlights the US cohort as the dominant political demographic on the platform.
Rather than relying on easily masked IP addresses, analysts exposed these positions by tracking onchain behavior: identifying distinct trading schedules and patterns that a VPN simply cannot scrub away. Granted, this forensic methodology can only confidently assign a geographic tag to roughly 6% of all active political wallets, meaning the resulting statistics serve as an indicative compass for market trends rather than an absolute audit. Yet, even within this sample, the data indicates that US-linked participants outnumber the runner-up nation four to one.
Wars, Not Elections, Are the American Obsession
The true anomaly, however, lies in what these domestic participants are choosing to trade. While global audiences typically flock to election outcomes, US-linked traders largely turn their backs on them, allocating a mere 16% of their capital to election cycles compared to the 32% global average. Instead, their fascination tilts toward international conflict and unpredictability. Geopolitical events captured nearly half of the US volume (46%), far outpacing the platform’s broader baseline of 36%.
This appetite manifests in striking ways: five of the top twelve US-dominated positions involved the conflict in Iran, and their absolute largest single focus, raking in $20.8 million, was a quirky contract predicting whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would appear in a suit.
These are the exact ynconventional scenarios that domestic, compliant platforms like Kalshi completely bypass in favor of sober macroeconomic reports and standard voting tallies.
Confidence Without an Edge
Here’s the part regulators might find almost reassuring.
On markets that have already resolved, US wallets picked the winning side 81.9% of the time, against 80.3% for everyone else: a gap too small to call an edge. Americans traded with more swagger than accuracy: at one point, they poured 53% of their volume into a US invasion of Iran, while the rest of the market sat at a cooler 26%. Allium’s own read: these look like “confident speculators” in aggregate, even if a few insiders can’t be ruled out.
A separate June study by Rutgers statistician Harry Crane, working from which sports fans traded and when, put the American share of Polymarket‘s overall volume even higher, near 30%. The methods differ; the conclusion doesn’t. The ban redirected the money, not the appetite.
Zelenskyy never confirmed he’d wear that suit. But the biggest crowd with money riding on the answer was never supposed to be in the room at all… it just found the door around the back, same as it always has.