Polymarket Seeks CFTC Approval to Open Main Exchange to US Traders

Polymarket recorded over $10 billion in monthly trading volume last month without a single U.S. citizen being able to use its main international platform. Today, the company has decided that this arrangement is no longer acceptable.

Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Polymarket has been in active discussions with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in recent weeks, pushing to lift the ban on US-based customers trading directly on its international exchange. The people familiar with the talks asked not to be named. If it works, it would be the biggest expansion in prediction market history. It is also coming at arguably the messiest moment the company has faced since its 2022 regulatory blowup.

The Gap Bloomberg Is Actually Describing

This is worth getting straight, because it is easy to blur. Polymarket already has CFTC approval to operate in the US. In November 2025, the regulator issued an Amended Order of Designation allowing Polymarket to run a federally regulated intermediated trading platform here. Americans can technically access its markets through futures commission merchants and brokerages. The company relaunched in December 2025 on an invite-only basis with restricted markets.

That is not what today’s Bloomberg report is about.

What Polymarket is now pushing for is permission to bring its actual main exchange to US users, the same platform the rest of the world trades on. The company had been trying to build a separate US-facing product as a workaround. Per Bloomberg, that effort has failed to fully launch. Therefore, rather than keep funding a parallel product that isn’t working, the company went back to Washington.

$112 Million and Four Years of Groundwork

Getting here was neither quick nor cheap. Polymarket paid a $1.4 million CFTC fine in 2022 and agreed to exit the US market for running an unregistered derivatives exchange. It spent the next three years building internationally, eventually clearing over $3 billion in monthly trades by October 2025, all without American users on its main platform.

The regulatory rehabilitation happened in stages. The CFTC and DOJ dropped their separate investigations into Polymarket in July 2025 without new charges. Within days, the company spent $112 million acquiring QCEX, a CFTC-licensed exchange and clearinghouse, giving it the infrastructure to legally re-enter the US. Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, committed up to $2 billion the same month, eventually completing roughly $1.64 billion in direct investment. By February 2026 Polymarket was valued at $9 billion.

Separately, the company today also rolled out CTF Exchange V2, its largest technical infrastructure upgrade since launch, alongside a new collateral token called pUSD backed 1:1 by USDC. The Bloomberg report and the exchange upgrade landed on the same day.

Five Days Ago, the CFTC Charged a Soldier for Trading on It

On April 23, the CFTC filed its first ever insider trading complaint involving event contracts. It was tied directly to Polymarket.

The defendant is Gannon Van Dyke, a US Army service member from North Carolina. The CFTC alleges he used classified information from a military operation known as Operation Absolute Resolve to purchase over 436,000 “Yes” shares on a Polymarket contract tied to the removal of Nicolás Maduro, clearing over $400,000 in profit. The DOJ filed parallel criminal charges in the Southern District of New York. The CFTC confirmed it was the first time the agency used what regulators call the “Eddie Murphy Rule”, the prohibition on trading based on misappropriated government information, to bring event contract charges.

Van Dyke is not an isolated case. Israeli Air Force officers have reportedly been investigated and indicted for betting on the timing of strikes against Iran. One crew member told investigators during interrogation: “the entire squadron is on Polymarket, the entire air force is betting.” Close to $850,000 in bets on nuclear detonations appeared on the platform when the Iran conflict began. Polymarket removed that market shortly after most of the positions were placed.

This is the backdrop against which the company is asking for broader US access.

A Shrinking Regulator, 19 State Lawsuits, and Two Country Bans in Two Days

The CFTC is now smaller than at any point in the past 15 years. Staffing has dropped 24% under Trump, leaving the agency at around 535 employees. A CNN report last week detailed growing concern among lawmakers that the regulator simply cannot police an industry growing at this pace. Under the current framework, CFTC-approved prediction market platforms are required to self-certify that their individual market offerings comply with federal rules. The CFTC is not reviewing each contract. That self-regulatory model is drawing more fire by the week.

State-level enforcement adds another layer of friction. The Nevada Gaming Control Board sued Polymarket in January 2026 for offering event contracts to state residents without a gaming license. Massachusetts courts ruled that similar contracts constituted illegal sports wagering under state law. Kalshi, Polymarket’s main US rival, is currently fighting over 19 active state-level actions. The CFTC and DOJ recently sued Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois for their enforcement attempts against federally regulated prediction market platforms — a dispute in which the Third Circuit sided with the platforms.

Brazil banned Polymarket two days ago, on April 26. Portugal banned it in March. And hanging over the entire regulatory picture: Donald Trump Jr. is a paid adviser to Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket, while Trump’s own social media company has announced plans to launch a prediction platform. Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation specifically targeting that overlap.

What Happens If the CFTC Says Yes

March 2026, with US users locked off the main platform, produced over $10 billion in trading volume. The United States remains the single largest market Polymarket cannot yet fully access.

Opening the main exchange to American traders would not just add users. It would change the scale of every contract on the platform, Fed decision markets, election bets, geopolitical contracts. It would also make the intermediated FCM model already approved largely redundant, and render the failed domestic alternative a sunk cost.

The business case for Polymarket making this push is straightforward. Whether the CFTC is willing to hand Polymarket that expansion right now, while processing its first ever event contract insider trading case, while state regulators chip away at the federal framework, and while the agency itself is operating at 15-year low staffing, is a completely different question.

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