Polymarket Deposit Guide (2026): Every Method

Most people searching for a Polymarket deposit are either about to send money for the first time, or have already sent it and are staring at a balance that has not moved. This covers both products separately, since almost nothing carries across between them, then works through what to do when funds go quiet. None of this is financial, tax or legal advice.

Polymarket Deposit Methods: Two Products, Two Sets of Rails

The assumption that costs people the most is that "Polymarket" is one account. The global platform is a crypto exchange settling on Polygon which, per its own homepage, is not regulated by the CFTC. Polymarket US is operated by QCX LLC as a CFTC regulated Designated Contract Market, with its own app, KYC, fee schedule and dollar rails. Money on one is not spendable on the other, and which one you can legally use depends on where you are, which is a region by region question.

Every documented funding route on the global platform is crypto, and no fiat on ramp provider is named anywhere in the docs or on the homepage. If you hold no crypto, the realistic options are to buy USDC on an exchange and send it to your Polygon or Base deposit address, or to use Polymarket US if you are eligible for it. Any guide that names a specific card processor for the global platform has gone past what Polymarket publishes.

There is now a third pot. Polymarket Perps runs a separate account funded by moving pUSD from your Polymarket wallet into a dedicated deposit contract, minimum 10 pUSD. Balances do not transfer automatically, so a zero Perps balance after funding the main wallet is expected, not broken.

How to Deposit on Polymarket's Global Platform

The mechanism is a bridge, and every failure mode below follows from it. You request deposit addresses, which come in four types: EVM for Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism and other EVM chains, SVM for Solana, BTC for Bitcoin, and TVM for Tron. Each address is unique to your wallet. Send a supported asset from a supported chain to the matching address, the bridge routes and swaps it, and the output lands as pUSD on Polygon.

The only reason to care about pUSD is that older guides still describe your Polymarket balance as USDC.e. That stopped being true when pUSD launched, and both native USDC and bridged USDC.e now get wrapped into it automatically. Our explainer on how Polymarket works has the wider tour.

Polymarket's help centre sets out the in app flow as six steps: press Deposit, choose a deposit method (its worked example is Transfer Crypto), choose the token and network, copy the deposit address, send at least that chain's minimum, then refresh the page. That last step earns its place, because a balance that has not moved is sometimes just a stale screen. The phrasing "for example" is the only official hint that other in app methods exist, and nothing in the documentation names one.

Minimum Deposit and Which Chains Actually Work

There is no single Polymarket minimum deposit. Minimums are per asset, published live through the bridge's supported assets endpoint as a field called minCheckoutUsd, and they change. The values below came from that endpoint, bridge.polymarket.com/supported-assets, on 8 August 2026. Be aware that Polymarket publishes more than one set of figures. Its retail help centre gives $20 for Ethereum and $3 for Solana; its developer prose table gives a third set again, different from both, alongside a partly different chain list. All of them point you back to the endpoint, which is why we called it. Since they disagree, check the figure the app shows you before you send, and if you are moving a small amount over Ethereum, work to the higher published threshold.

Coverage is far wider than stablecoins: Ethereum alone lists dozens of assets, from WBTC and LINK to PAXG, PYUSD and a pile of memecoins. "Robinhood" really does appear as a source chain, which is new and unexplained by any announcement we could find. A transfer below the relevant minimum does not credit straight away, and the sources disagree on what happens next: Polymarket's developer docs say such deposits will not be processed, while its help centre says they remain pending until the cumulative amount sent to that address meets the minimum. Assume pending rather than lost, send the shortfall to the same deposit address, and contact support if it stays stuck.

What a Deposit Actually Costs

Trading in the app is gasless because a relayer pays. Funding is not, and that catches people out. The bridge's quote endpoint shows the cost before you send. It returns a network gas fee on the sending chain, an app fee (labelled "Bridge fee" in one docs sample and "Fun.xyz fee" in another), a fill cost, which is the bridge's spread for taking the other side, swap impact, which is the price you move by converting your asset into pUSD and which grows on thin or volatile assets, and a maximum slippage figure. The only worked example Polymarket publishes shows those at 0.3 percent, 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent, turning $10.00 into $9.94 all in, with a minimum received after slippage of $9.89. Those numbers come from a single illustrative payload; a second sample in the API reference shows the same fields at zero. Treat roughly 0.6 percent as the shape of a small stablecoin deposit, expect more on a volatile asset, and pull a live quote for your own amount.

On $50 that is noise. On five figures it is real money, which is presumably why the docs suggest deposits above $50,000 from non Polygon chains use a third party bridge such as DeBridge, Across or Portal instead, while stating plainly that Polymarket is not affiliated with or responsible for any of them. Funding costs are separate from trading costs, which are in our Polymarket fees guide, and the endpoints behind all of this sit in our Polymarket API guide.

Polymarket US: Card, Apple Pay and ACH

Polymarket US documents three funding rails: bank transfer through Aeropay at 1 to 3 business days, debit or credit card through Checkout.com listed as instant, and Apple Pay through Checkout.com, also instant. The API funding source enum actually lists four types: a generic bank account, an Aeropay linked bank account, a Checkout card and Apple Pay. That leaves one funding source the payments overview never describes. A deposit moves through Acknowledged, then Processing, then Completed, with Cancelled and Refunded meaning it did not go through. One detail worth knowing before you choose: withdrawals must return to the original deposit source, so the rail you fund with is the rail you will exit through.

Several things simply are not published. The Aeropay and Checkout.com integration pages both currently read "Work in Progress" with no content, so retail minimums, limits, 3D Secure behaviour and decline reasons are undocumented. The dollar figures circulating online appear only inside a sample JSON payload in the developer docs, which the docs label as a data structure example. The whole Payments API also carries a banner marking it beta and subject to change without notice. The US fee schedule mentions no deposit or payment method fee anywhere, but with those pages unfinished we will not call card deposits free.

Access is not universal either: full KYC is required, some states are excluded, and the legal fights are live. Minnesota's SF 3432 would have criminalised creating, operating, hosting or advertising prediction markets in the state from 1 August 2026, but a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction on 28 July 2026 blocking enforcement while the preemption case proceeds. That is the position as at 8 August 2026 and it could flip on appeal, so check the docket before you rely on it.

Deposit Not Showing Up? Work the Ladder

On the global platform, deposits typically complete within a few minutes, though the docs warn that network conditions can stretch that and recommend polling status every 10 to 30 seconds. That holds for the fast chains: Polygon, Base, Arbitrum and the rest of the cheap EVM set. Bitcoin and Ethereum deposits wait on slower block times and busy network fees, so allow longer there before you treat one as stuck. No per chain confirmation counts, guaranteed SLA or first deposit hold are published, so treat a precise figure from a third party guide with suspicion. Work through the checks in order.

1. Refresh the app and check the balance again. Polymarket's own deposit steps end with a page refresh, and a stale screen accounts for a fair share of deposits that look missing.
2. Confirm the asset and chain pair is on the live supported assets list. Polymarket warns that sending unsupported tokens may cause irrecoverable loss.
3. Confirm the value cleared that chain's minimum. A below minimum deposit is not necessarily lost: the help centre says it sits pending until the cumulative amount sent to that address reaches the minimum, so sending the shortfall to the same address can clear it, though the developer docs word the outcome more harshly.
4. Confirm the address type matched the chain: EVM assets to the EVM address, Solana to SVM, Bitcoin to BTC, Tron to TVM.
5. Check where the money actually went by pasting the deposit address into that chain's block explorer, which tells you whether the send landed at all. Developers can poll the bridge status endpoint documented at docs.polymarket.com/trading/bridge/status: the six statuses are DEPOSIT_DETECTED, PROCESSING, ORIGIN_TX_CONFIRMED, SUBMITTED, COMPLETED and FAILED, and the first four are non terminal, meaning the correct response is to wait.
6. If it reads FAILED, is stuck well past a few minutes, or funds are held for a compliance check, escalate. Polymarket's help centre tells retail users to contact Polymarket support through the chat widget on polymarket.com with their transaction hash; the developer docs tell API builders to route their users to the bridge provider, Fun (fun.xyz). Start with Polymarket support, and have your deposit address, the source chain transaction hash and the amount to hand.
7. If you sent the wrong token or used the wrong network, start with Polymarket's Recover Missing Deposit article. The self serve tool at recovery.polymarket.com recovers tokens from your Polymarket proxy wallet.

The status format itself explains a lot of empty screens. The status response only includes a destination transaction hash once the status is COMPLETED, and the creation timestamp is missing while it still reads DEPOSIT_DETECTED, so a pending deposit with no hash to look up is normal.

The recovery route is narrower than the deposit route. Polymarket's Recover Missing Deposit article covers both wrong token and wrong network sends, and it splits the six EVM networks the tool lists: Ethereum and Polygon have self serve recovery, while Base, Arbitrum, Optimism and BNB Chain mean contacting support with your transaction hash. The article also carries a section on what cannot be recovered. Solana, Bitcoin and Tron are deposit chains with no listed recovery path at all, which is a good reason to check the address type twice before sending on those three.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Funding Polymarket comes down to three questions answered before you press send: which product you are actually using, whether your asset and chain are on the live supported list, and whether the amount clears that chain's minimum with enough left over that a fraction of a percent in bridge costs does not sting. Get those right and the rest is a few minutes of waiting. Get them wrong and you are in the recovery tool, or on a chain it does not cover. If the platform itself is new to you, start with our walkthrough from first visit to first trade, and if you want to compare prices across venues before deciding which balance is worth funding, that is what Predictefy is for. Verified against Polymarket's primary documentation and its live bridge endpoint on 8 August 2026; minimums and fees move, so check the source before a large transfer.