U.S.-Linked Wallets Lead Polymarket Political Trading Despite Geoblock

U.S.-linked wallets generated $571 million in political-market volume on Polymarket over the past year, making them the platform’s largest national political-trading cohort despite geographic restrictions.

The Allium-linked dataset identified 3,776 U.S.-linked wallets in the political-market sample. The group ranked ahead of Hong Kong, which accounted for about $422 million in political-market volume, and remained the largest country cohort among the wallets that could be tied to a jurisdiction.

The numbers are directional rather than complete. Allium’s country tags cover only about 6% of Polymarket political-market wallets, and the tags are based on onchain behavior rather than IP addresses. That makes the dataset useful for reading participation patterns, but not a full census of every trader on the platform.

Geoblock Leaves Onchain Activity Visible

Polymarket’s documentation lists the United States among jurisdictions where users are restricted, with orders from blocked regions rejected through geographic controls. The platform’s help center also says VPNs or similar tools are prohibited for bypassing geographic restrictions.

The Allium data shows that the access block has not removed U.S.-linked political trading from the onchain record. A wallet and stablecoin-based market can still leave behavioral traces even when the frontend blocks users by location, especially if traders use VPNs, offshore access points or wallets already funded with crypto.

That gap sits at the center of the prediction-market policy fight. A House Oversight probe asked Kalshi and Polymarket for documents covering KYC, access controls and suspicious-trading monitoring after concerns over insider-trading risk on prediction markets moved into Congress.

Political Demand Skews Toward Geopolitics

The U.S.-linked cohort leaned more heavily into geopolitics than the wider Polymarket user base. Geopolitical markets accounted for about 46% of U.S. notional volume, compared with roughly 36% across the platform, while election markets made up a smaller share for U.S.-linked wallets than for global traders.

That split matters because regulated U.S. prediction-market platforms generally list a narrower set of contracts than Polymarket’s global platform. Kalshi and Polymarket’s regulated U.S. push has focused on compliant market structures, while offshore crypto rails continue to list contracts tied to wars, diplomacy, political shocks and other sensitive events.

Regulatory pressure has already moved across state and federal fronts. Kentucky sued Kalshi and Polymarket over alleged unlicensed sportsbook-style products, while senators asked the CFTC to review Polymarket after allegations tied to fake-bet marketing and political-market promotion.

The Allium sample also found no clear forecasting edge for U.S.-linked wallets. Resolved markets showed U.S.-linked wallets backing winners at a rate close to the rest of the platform, leaving the main signal as participation and access pressure rather than superior political information.

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