Compliance Update — January 2022

This past year and a half, we’ve had the pleasure of watching our one of a kind Polymarket community grow from nothing into the magical corner of the internet that it is today. This has been the most fulfilling experience of our lives, and we’re just getting started.

This is the first of several announcements that we’ll be making over the next couple of weeks expanding on the evolution of Polymarket and important changes ahead.

We remain firmly committed to leveraging market-based forecasts and Web 3 primitives to expand global access to unbiased information, and to doing so in a manner that complies with all applicable law. Accordingly, the Polymarket.com website will be undergoing a series of operational and architectural changes.

Starting today, the trading functionality on Polymarket.com will no longer be available to users from prohibited jurisdictions, including the United States. Information, forecasts, and data visualization will remain globally accessible for all. Additionally, a new site, Polymarket.us, is now available for past users located in prohibited jurisdictions to close out or redeem their outcome tokens, withdraw their USDC, or export their private key for use in any other Polygon-supported wallet. Polymarket.us only displays past markets, all of which are set to resolve by January 14th, 2022. Remember, Polymarket has always been completely non-custodial, and all of your cryptoassets in the wallet that you used for Polymarket in the past are completely safe and your own.

As Polymarket continues to grow, our core mission remains the same: to harness the power of free markets to demystify the real world events that matter most to you; and market participation is only one part of the equation to achieve this goal. It doesn’t take many people to participate in a given market in order for it to produce invaluable information, with the potential to help people all over the world better plan for their future; we’ve seen this first hand.

In Polymarket’s first year and a half, engagement data reflects that the vast majority of the approximately 1 million unique visitors to Polymarket.com have never participated in a market, despite the duration of the average site visit being in line with that of a content publication site; this indicates that the primary way people are finding value in Polymarket is for solely informational purposes. Additionally, based on conversations with the community, many of Polymarket’s biggest supporters religiously use the website as an informational resource, considering it home to the most accurate, unbiased probabilistic forecasts on the internet, with no intention to ever “trade”. Thus, going forward, expect the product to evolve in accordance with these important insights, with Polymarket becoming more information and forecast-oriented, and further designed to empower users to make better decisions by tailoring their Polymarket experience around the market-borne forecasts that are significant to them.

Please read the updated Terms of Use, and if you are not in a prohibited jurisdiction, feel free to continue using Polymarket.com however you wish, and expect exciting, highly-anticipated new features soon. If you are in a prohibited jurisdiction, you can still stay up to date on the questions and topics most important to you and receive personalized insights on how to interpret these forecasts. If you are an American and want to continue trading information markets, we suggest Kalshi, a U.S. regulated exchange with markets on various events, PredictIt, a political prediction market operating through a CFTC no-action letter, and Nadex, a U.S. regulated exchange with markets on forex, events, indices, and commodities.

All things considered, the journey to arriving at this inflection point for Polymarket has been a humbling and transformational experience, and we are excited to continue championing our mission and building out our global footprint, information and educational initiatives, and U.S. product.

To stay up to date, you can join the Polymarket Community Discord, follow Polymarket on social media, or email hello@polymarket.com.