What Is Polymarket US? The Regulated Version Explained

If you read that prediction markets are legal in America now and went looking for your old account, this post saves you an hour. Polymarket US is a different exchange from polymarket.com: different legal entity, different money, different app, different rules. The global platform still blocks US residents, and the filing that would change that was, as far as we could establish on 8 August 2026, still undecided at the CFTC.

Articles blur the two because the brand gives you nothing to work with: both are called "Polymarket", both ship from Blockratize Inc, and the American app listing even quotes global user statistics. So this guide sticks to the plumbing. None of it is legal, tax or financial advice.

What Polymarket US Actually Is

The entity is QCX LLC, doing business as Polymarket US, acquired as QCEX in July 2025 for $112 million. It holds two designations: Designated Contract Market, which is the exchange itself, and Derivatives Clearing Organization, which means it clears its own trades through Polymarket Clearing instead of paying an outside clearing house to do it. Most people assume this is Polymarket with KYC bolted on. It is a structurally heavier piece of financial infrastructure that happens to share a logo, and even the app is only an affiliated software provider sitting on top of the exchange.

The market list has moved on too. The waitlist came off in mid-May 2026, half-cent tick sizes arrived in June, and the changelog since then reads like a sportsbook catalogue: roughly 50 NFL market types on 5 August 2026, plus MLB, NHL, UFC, tennis, cricket and World Cup markets. Politics-only descriptions are out of date.

Polymarket US vs International: The Differences That Matter

Polymarket's help centre puts it plainly. The US app is "a separate product designed specifically for users in the United States", polymarket.com "is not accessible for US residents", and the two are "separate products with separate support teams". Here is where they diverge.

Accounts are not linked, so there is no migration and no shared position history. The two exchanges also run independent order books, which means the same event can print different prices on each; since the global platform blocks US residents, that gap is not one an American trader can act on. Even the documentation sites treat each other as foreign. docs.polymarket.us carries a single pointer out, "Looking for Polymarket International documentation? Visit International Docs", to docs.polymarket.com (checked 8 August 2026).

One question we could not settle is the obvious one for anyone with money still on polymarket.com. Neither platform publishes what a US resident is meant to do with a legacy balance: we found no withdrawal-only path documented for restricted users and no policy page covering the situation at all. If that is you, the only route we can point to is support@polymarket.com, and it is worth asking before assuming the funds follow you anywhere.

The App: Mobile Only, and Android Is Now Live

There is no web trading. Load polymarket.us and you get a marketing page with phone mockups and social sign-in buttons: no order book, no prices, no trade ticket. Whether a browser interface is planned has not been published anywhere we could find. The Android app is live on Google Play under developer BLOCKRATIZE INC, last updated on 3 August 2026, with its listing pointing at polymarket.us terms. That last-updated date is not a launch date, and we could not establish when the Android build actually went public. The iOS app is shipping actively, at version 2.7.6 at the time of writing. Polymarket's own help centre still carries an "Android App - Coming Soon" section (checked 8 August 2026), which is stale and is probably the source of every iOS-only claim still circulating.

Trading runs close to round the clock, with a maintenance window every Thursday from 2am to 6am Eastern. One thing on the screen may be about to change: on 7 August 2026 the CFTC reminded regulated markets to display clear and accurate pricing, warning that the "American" odds format borrowed from casino bookmakers "is likely to mislead market participants" and "may deprive users of access to indicia of market depth and pricing impact". The CFTC framed it as a reminder to regulated entities, not an order, and how any given interface responds to it is guesswork on our part.

Funding happens inside the app, in dollars, by bank transfer (ACH) or debit card. Credit cards are not on the documented list, so do not plan a deposit around one.

Polymarket US Fees, and How They Compare With Kalshi

Before the numbers, the vocabulary the fee page assumes. You are a taker when your order fills immediately against an order already resting on the book. You are a maker when your limit order sits on the book and someone else fills it.

Fees are charged per fill on a symmetric curve: a coefficient multiplied by the contract count, by the price, and by one minus the price. The charge peaks at 50 cents, where uncertainty is highest, and fades to almost nothing at the extremes. The taker coefficient is 0.06, capped at $1.50 per 100 contracts. In dollars: 100 contracts at 60 cents costs 0.06 x 100 x 0.60 x 0.40, or $1.44. The same 100 at 90 cents costs $0.54. At 50 cents the formula returns exactly the $1.50 ceiling. The maker coefficient is negative 0.0125, so a maker filling 100 contracts at 50 cents is paid $0.31, and that credit lands at execution rather than at month end. High-volume takers also earn rebates against their taker fees, paid out weekly: 10 percent from $250,000 of monthly taker volume, 25 percent from $1 million, 50 percent from $10 million. Fees round to the nearest cent, with exact half-cents going to the nearer even cent instead of always up. All of it is on the US fee page, checked 8 August 2026.

Against Kalshi, the taker comparison is clear and the maker comparison is not. Kalshi's taker coefficient is 0.07, peaking at 1.75 cents per contract, so a Polymarket US taker pays roughly 14 percent less at the same price. On the maker side we are not calling a winner: Kalshi's fee schedule PDF was unreachable when we checked on 8 August 2026, and second-hand summaries of it disagree with each other, so all we will say is that Polymarket US pays a maker rebate. The rounding rule is worth correcting while we are here, because most comparisons still get it wrong. Kalshi rounds each trade fee up to the nearest hundredth of a cent and rebates accumulated rounding overpayments once they pass a cent (Kalshi's fee rounding documentation, checked 8 August 2026); the cent-level round-up you will still see quoted comes from an older schedule. Our Kalshi fees breakdown covers that venue in full, and the very different global schedule sits in the Polymarket fees guide. One caveat on the US page: it documents trading fees and rebates only. No deposit or withdrawal fee appears there, but absence from a page is not a published zero.

Is Polymarket US Legal, and Which States Can Use It?

Federally, yes: it is a CFTC regulated exchange trading event contracts as derivatives, which is a different legal object from a state-licensed sportsbook. Several states disagree about where that line falls. The CFTC has itself sued exactly five, in its own words Kentucky, New Mexico, Minnesota, Illinois and Rhode Island, seeking a declaration that federal authority over event contracts is exclusive. You will see "nine states" repeated across aggregator sites; that figure comes from a CFTC sentence listing states where prediction-market litigation exists generally, not states the agency sued.

Two situations actually affect access. Nevada is out, after its Gaming Control Board won a preliminary injunction against Polymarket on 29 May 2026, and the app listing carries the line "Trading currently unavailable in NV" directly under marketing copy claiming all 50 states. Minnesota is the one most articles get wrong: its statute would have criminalised operating or advertising a prediction market from 1 August 2026, but a federal judge enjoined it on 28 July, days before it was due to take effect, so it is not in force. Separately, at least ten states had issued cease-and-desist orders to prediction-market operators by January 2026, most of them aimed at Kalshi rather than Polymarket; we have not seen the ten enumerated in one place, so we cannot tell you whether yours is among them. Tennessee's order, in January 2026, was the first directed at Polymarket and demanded customer refunds by 31 January. We found no reporting on how it resolved.

We will not publish a definitive state list. Polymarket maintains no public one, the third party maps we found predate both the Nevada injunction and the Minnesota ruling, and sports contracts can be switched off in a state where the platform otherwise works. Check the app for your own state. Polymarket has not published where in signup the geographic check runs, so we cannot tell you whether you find out at the sign-in screen or only after uploading identity documents; assume you may have to complete verification to learn where you stand. For the wider picture, read our region by region legality guide. Regulated does not mean unpoliced, either: the CFTC ordered George Santos to pay $35,000 on 31 July 2026 over manipulative trading in a State of the Union contract.

The Polymarket US API Is a Different Animal

There is a public API, and it shares essentially nothing with the global one beyond the brand. The documented surface covers REST, WebSocket, gRPC streaming and a FIX interface for institutions, with official Python and TypeScript SDKs. Authentication is Private Key JWT with API keys: you register a public key and sign a short-lived token with the private half. The global platform instead has you sign EIP-712 messages, which are wallet signatures over structured data, against a Polygon order book. Code written for one will not run against the other, which is worth knowing before you start porting; our guide to the global API covers that stack separately.

The institutional kit gives away that this was built as an exchange first. It has drop-copy streams, which push a live copy of your own fills to a second system, and self-match prevention, which stops your own resting orders trading against each other, alongside an RFQ system, combo instruments and separate development and production environments. One constraint for research tooling: under a policy introduced on 13 July 2026, the API keeps orders for 90 days, market data for 45 and executions for 7, so longer histories have to live on your side. Everything documented sits at docs.polymarket.us.

How to Tell Which Polymarket You Are On

Ignore the branding and check the plumbing. The domain is the fastest tell: polymarket.us is the American exchange, polymarket.com the global one. The money is the next one: dollars behind an identity check mean Polymarket US, pUSD on Polygon behind a wallet means global. And if you are trading in a browser at all you are on the global platform, because the American product has no web interface at the time of writing.

Which brings us to the misconception that prompted this post. American legalisation did not reopen the crypto platform to Americans. Polymarket filed with the CFTC on 28 April 2026 for permission to let US users trade directly on the global exchange, and the most recent coverage we could find, from July, still describes that as pending. The 2025 approvals people cite, a no-action letter in September and an amended order of designation in November, are what allowed Polymarket US to launch. Until the newer filing is decided, reaching the global site from the States means a VPN, which breaches its terms, is detected, and gets accounts frozen with funds at risk.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Treat Polymarket US as a new venue and most of the confusion goes away. The regulatory picture is still moving week to week, so verify state availability and funding terms in the app rather than from any article, this one included, and take none of the above as legal, tax or financial advice. For how it compares with the obvious alternative, our Polymarket versus Kalshi comparison is the next stop. Checked against primary sources on 8 August 2026, with the gaps we could not close flagged in the text above.