Throughout 2025, while Kalshi, Robinhood, and other companies offering prediction-market platforms dealt with a litany of lawsuits, Polymarket was able to quietly prepare its U.S. app while staying out of the legal fray.
Things have changed. Not long after it launched its U.S. app in December, Polymarket was sued by the Nevada Gaming Control Board. It currently faces at least half a dozen lawsuits in the U.S., including cases from state regulators in Wisconsin and Rhode Island, as well as a new suit brought Friday by a nonprofit called the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
Meanwhile, Polymarket’s international platform—which users in the U.S. are not supposed to be allowed to access—has produced two high-profile cases. In April, a U.S. soldier was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly using inside information to make more than $400,000 trading on when the military would capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. A month later, the DOJ indicted a Google software engineer for allegedly using confidential internal information to make more than $1.2 million on Polymarket by betting on markets related to who the most-searched person of 2025 would be.
Many of the lawsuits filed against platforms have centered on sports event contracts, which are regulated at the federal level by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The argument is that such markets are just sports betting in disguise, and they should be regulated on a state-by-state basis, which is the framework for traditional sports betting.
