Polymarket: $571M in U.S. political bets despite IP ban
In brief
- U.S. wallets traded $571 million on Polymarket political contracts, exceeding Hong Kong's $422 million
- Americans allocated 46% of volume to geopolitical bets versus 36% platform-wide average
- Foreign-conflict markets dominated U.S. trading at 46% versus elections at just 16%
The offshore arbitrage
The IP block didn't end U.S. participation. It moved the largest single political market offshore—visible onchain but beyond U.S. oversight. Polymarket blocks U.S. users by IP address because it cannot legally serve them. Yet the platform runs on crypto rails with no bank or broker intermediary, making the restriction trivial to circumvent. A VPN masks location; an existing wallet and stablecoins bypass any account-creation gate.
The result: American traders bet on markets U.S. regulators don't permit. Geopolitics made up 46% of U.S. notional volume against 36% platform-wide. Elections drew only 16% from U.S. wallets versus 32% globally. The divergence is stark: American traders bet foreign wars at nearly three times the rate they traded elections.
War bets and novelty markets
Five of the U.S. cohort's twelve biggest markets were bets on the Iran war. At one point, Americans placed 53% of their volume on a U.S. invasion of Iran when the rest of the market sat at 26%. The single largest U.S. market was a novelty bet on whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would wear a suit, valued at $20.8 million.
This appetite for geopolitical speculation reflects a gap in regulated U.S. venues. Kalshi and Polymarket's compliant U.S. arm stick mostly to economic data, rate decisions and elections. Foreign conflicts and novelties aren't listed. Offshore, they are—and Americans took the arbitrage.
Skill and returns
U.S. wallets picked winners no better than the broader market. On resolved markets, U.S. wallets backed the winner 81.9% of the time against 80.3% for everyone else. Returns, if held, were nearly identical. The Americans bet more boldly on certain markets but achieved no edge in accuracy or profit.
The data itself carries a caveat. Allium could tie only about 6% of Polymarket's political-market wallets to a country, so the figures should be read as directional rather than exact.
