For most of its existence, the answer to "can a US trader use Polymarket?" was a flat no, enforced by geoblocks, a $1.4 million CFTC settlement in January 2022, and the awkward reality that the platform sat offshore on the Polygon blockchain while the regulator that mattered most sat in Washington. That answer changed in late 2025. Polymarket spent $112 million in July 2025 to acquire QCEX, a CFTC-licensed designated contract market with its own derivatives clearing organisation, and on 25 November 2025 the CFTC issued an Amended Order of Designation that cleared the path for intermediated US access. US onboarding restarted in December 2025 through an invite-only waitlist, sports-first, with other categories expanding from there. In spring 2026 Polymarket dropped the waitlist and opened general signup, so present-day access is open registration rather than an invite queue.
The shape of that access is the interesting bit. Polymarket did not simply flip a switch and let American users wander in with a crypto wallet. It rebuilt its US offering around the architecture the CFTC requires for any regulated derivatives venue, which means brokers, KYC, surveillance and clearing. If you are trying to work out whether you can actually trade on it, and what the experience looks like compared to the offshore version most people remember, the mechanics matter more than the headline.
What QCEX actually bought Polymarket
QCEX is not a household name, and that is rather the point. It is a small CFTC-licensed exchange with two things Polymarket badly needed: a Designated Contract Market licence and an attached Derivatives Clearing Organisation. The DCM is the venue authorisation that lets a platform list event contracts to US persons. The DCO handles the clearing and settlement obligations that any regulated derivatives market has to satisfy. Buying both in a single $112 million transaction in July 2025 gave Polymarket a regulated wrapper without the years of greenfield application work Kalshi had to grind through.
The CFTC's Amended Order of Designation on 25 November 2025 was the moment that wrapper became operational for the merged entity. That order is what allows the platform to onboard US users under Part 16 reporting, surveillance and clearing obligations. Read alongside our breakdown of what an event contract actually is in the regulated US sense, the move makes Polymarket structurally similar to Kalshi rather than to its own offshore predecessor.
The intermediated model, and why it is not what you remember
Here is where US Polymarket diverges sharply from the version most international users still see. Access is intermediated. That means you do not deposit USDC into a self-custodied wallet and start clicking yes or no. You open an account with a regulated broker, specifically a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM), and that FCM routes your orders to the exchange. The FCM holds your funds in a segregated customer account, runs the KYC, and is the legal counterparty between you and the clearinghouse.
This is the same plumbing that sits behind every regulated US futures product. It is unglamorous, it adds friction, and it kills the crypto-native UX Polymarket built its brand on. It also makes the platform legible to a regulator, an auditor and, eventually, an institutional allocator. Worth flagging: this is a different access model from Kalshi's, which lets retail users open accounts directly with the exchange. Our comparison of Polymarket and Kalshi walks through how the two now differ on user experience.
What signing up actually looks like
The December 2025 relaunch opened invite-only, through a waitlist. That waitlist was dissolved in spring 2026: US signup is now open to anyone eligible, currently through the iOS app, with web and Android still to follow. Eligibility means a US resident aged 18 or over with an address in a covered state. The onboarding flow is recognisable to anyone who has opened a brokerage or a futures account: government ID, proof of address, tax identification number, the standard suitability questions, and the disclosures that come with any leveraged or speculative product. The KYC is full, not the light-touch email-and-wallet flow of the offshore platform.
Funding goes through the broker. You wire dollars, or push them in via ACH, and they sit in a customer-segregated account before being allocated to positions. There is no on-chain deposit, no MetaMask connection, no USDC bridge for the US-regulated path. The contracts themselves still resolve through Polymarket's market machinery, but the cash leg, the reporting and the counterparty risk all sit inside the regulated stack. Anyone planning to size up should understand how prediction market odds work before clicking through that disclosure pile.
The compliance overlay
Part 16 of the CFTC's regulations is the bit that turns a prediction market into a reporting venue. The platform now has to report its trade and position data, retain order and trade records, run market surveillance, and submit to the clearing and supervisory regime the CFTC applies to every DCM. There is a compliance team. There is a chief compliance officer. There is an audit trail.
For a typical retail trader this overlay is invisible until it is not. Position limits exist on some contracts. Certain market types, in particular anything that could be classed as gaming or as an event contract on activities the CFTC has flagged as contrary to the public interest, may not list at all on the regulated US venue. The offshore Polymarket carries markets the US-regulated version cannot, and that gap will widen over time as the CFTC continues to police the perimeter of what counts as a permitted event contract. The broader US legal picture is covered in our guide to prediction market legality in the United States.
What the regulated path means for liquidity and pricing
A fragmented user base is a real risk for Polymarket. The offshore platform attracted a global crypto-native audience that produced deep order books on flagship contracts. The US-regulated venue starts with a much smaller pool: a newer, still-growing set of American users who have completed full KYC and funded an FCM account. Until those pools are bridged, or the regulated venue scales independently, you can expect wider spreads on the US side for the same underlying market.
This matters for arbitrage and for execution. If the offshore market prices a 2028 outcome at 42 cents and the US-regulated venue prices it at 39, the gap may persist longer than a unified market would tolerate. Sophisticated traders will notice; most retail users will not. The mechanics behind those persistent gaps are the same ones we walked through in our explainer on Polymarket arbitrage, with the added wrinkle that the two venues now have different legal counterparties and different funding rails.
What changed, and what did not
The pre-2022 Polymarket story is worth keeping in mind. The platform settled with the CFTC for $1.4 million in January 2022 over running an unregistered derivatives venue, blocked US users, and spent the next three years operating offshore while the regulatory landscape around event contracts shifted underneath it. Kalshi went the other direction, built a CFTC-licensed exchange from the start, and won the substantive legal fights over election contracts. Polymarket's QCEX acquisition is, in effect, the catch-up trade: buy the licence rather than build it.
What changed is the legal status of US access. What did not change is the underlying product. Polymarket is still a prediction market platform, still primarily defined by the breadth and quirkiness of its contracts, still distinct from sports betting in the ways our comparison piece on prediction markets and sports betting walks through. The wrapper is new. The thing inside the wrapper is mostly the same.
The practical takeaway
If you are a US resident who wants to trade on Polymarket today, the path runs through open signup (currently on the iOS app), an FCM account, full KYC, and a different user experience from the one you may have seen on screenshots from offshore. If you are a UK or European user, none of this applies to you, and your situation is covered in our guide to whether you can use Polymarket in the UK. If you are watching the space because you care about how regulated prediction markets evolve, the QCEX deal is the structural story of the cycle.
iPredicta tracks prediction market contracts across the regulated US venues and the global platforms, and the regulated Polymarket relaunch sits inside the same coverage net as Kalshi, Robinhood's event contracts and the UK exchange venues. The point is to give readers a clear view of how the same outcome is priced across very different legal wrappers, because that, more than any single market, is what the next phase of this industry actually looks like.
Frequently asked questions
Can US residents legally use Polymarket?
Yes, through the regulated path that opened in December 2025. That launch was invite-only at first, but Polymarket dropped the waitlist in spring 2026, so US signup is now open to eligible residents aged 18 or over, currently via the iOS app, with web and Android still to come. Access runs through a CFTC-regulated Futures Commission Merchant rather than a self-custodied crypto wallet, so you need a fully KYC'd brokerage account before you can trade. The legal authorisation comes from the CFTC's Amended Order of Designation issued on 25 November 2025, which followed Polymarket's $112 million acquisition of the QCEX exchange and clearinghouse in July 2025. Using the offshore Polymarket platform from a US IP address is still not the route the regulator intends, and the geoblocking that followed the 2022 settlement has not gone away for the offshore venue.
What is an FCM and why do I need one to trade Polymarket in the US?
A Futures Commission Merchant is a CFTC-registered broker that holds your funds, runs your KYC and routes your orders to a regulated derivatives exchange. The CFTC requires this intermediated model for most retail derivatives access, and Polymarket's regulated US venue has been built to fit that template. The practical upshot is that you open an account with the broker, not with Polymarket directly, and your dollars sit in a segregated customer account before they fund any position. This is the same plumbing behind any US futures product, and it is the structural reason the regulated Polymarket experience feels closer to a brokerage than to the crypto-native offshore version.
How is regulated Polymarket different from Kalshi?
Both are now CFTC-regulated event contract venues, but the access model differs in a way that matters for the user experience. Kalshi lets retail users open accounts directly with the exchange, which keeps the flow simple. Regulated Polymarket runs through an FCM broker layer, which adds an extra account, extra disclosures and a different funding rail. The contract catalogues also differ, since each platform lists what it can get approved and what its market-making operation can support. For a deeper look at how the two compare on fees, liquidity and the kinds of markets each one runs, our Polymarket vs Kalshi guide walks through it in detail.
Will all Polymarket markets be available to US users?
No, and that gap is structural rather than temporary. The offshore Polymarket lists markets the CFTC would not approve for a US-regulated venue, including contracts that touch on gaming-adjacent outcomes or sit in categories the regulator has flagged as contrary to the public interest. The US-regulated venue can only list what its CFTC designation allows, with Part 16 reporting and surveillance applied to every contract. Expect the US catalogue to be narrower than the global one on the novelty and cultural long tail and on any CFTC-flagged categories, even though sports led the US launch and remains its flagship. Expect the two product surfaces to evolve separately rather than converge. Power users tracking specific markets should check which venue carries them before assuming parity.
Why did Polymarket buy QCEX instead of getting its own CFTC licence?
Time and certainty. Building a CFTC-regulated exchange from scratch takes years of application work, capital commitment and legal back-and-forth, as Kalshi's history demonstrates. Buying QCEX for $112 million in July 2025 gave Polymarket an existing Designated Contract Market licence and an attached Derivatives Clearing Organisation in a single transaction, which compressed years of regulatory groundwork into a deal closing. The CFTC still had to approve the change through the Amended Order of Designation in November 2025, so the licence was not automatic, but the underlying infrastructure was already there. It is the catch-up trade: when the offshore-versus-licensed gap became commercially untenable, acquiring a licensed venue was the fastest route to compliance.