Bitcoin Magazine
CFTC Again Probes Polymarket Over Whether It Let Americans Trade
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating whether Polymarket broke a 2022 enforcement settlement, according to Reuters reporting earlier today. The probe revives an inquiry the agency closed in 2025 without filing charges. For a platform that has tried to fit prediction markets inside US law, the question strikes at its core.
Polymarket settled with the CFTC in January 2022 and paid a $1.4 million penalty for offering event-based binary options without registration. The company agreed to block American users from its offshore exchange. Geofencing tools followed, but regulators and critics pointed to traders who reached the site through VPNs. The platform has also courted crypto natives, adding bitcoin deposits in October 2025 as part of a broader push to fund accounts with digital assets.
According to the sources, investigators are examining three areas: the adequacy of Polymarket’s location controls, its advertising inside the United States, and the onboarding and customer protections on its US platform, which launched late last year.
The company is headquartered in New York and runs its offshore exchange through a Panama-registered entity. A probe is an inquiry, not a finding, and many investigations end without enforcement.
The inquiry sits inside a wider effort. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Polymarket paid individuals to produce videos of fictitious winning bets, and senators Adam Schiff and John Curtis urged the agency to open a probe. Bloomberg reported that investigators were examining the company’s social media activity.
Source link
