Wallets tied to the United States traded $571 million in notional volume across Polymarket's political markets over the last 12 months, the largest national total in Allium's latest report. Hong Kong ranked next at $422 million. The finding stands out because Polymarket is not allowed to serve U.S. users and blocks them by IP address, yet the report says that restriction has not kept American traders out.
Crypto rails weaken the effect of geo-blocking
According to Allium, Polymarket runs on crypto infrastructure that lets users enter with a wallet and stablecoins, without a bank, broker, or conventional customer account in the middle. That setup leaves little for a traditional gatekeeper to shut down. A user with an existing wallet and a VPN can still reach the platform, even if the site itself rejects U.S. IP addresses.
Allium's country labels do not come from IP data. They are inferred from wallets' onchain behavior, which is why a VPN that hides location from Polymarket does not necessarily hide a U.S.-linked wallet from blockchain analysis. Even so, the firm said the figures should be treated as directional, not exact, because it can assign only about 6% of Polymarket political-market wallets to a country. Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment before U.S. market hours.
American flow leaned harder into geopolitical contracts
The report also found a different pattern in what U.S. users chose to trade. Geopolitics accounted for 46% of U.S. notional volume, compared with 36% for the platform overall. Elections made up just 16% of U.S.-linked volume, while the platform-wide share was 32%. In effect, the U.S. cohort traded foreign-war markets at nearly three times the rate it traded election contracts.
Five of the 12 biggest markets for the U.S. cohort were related to the Iran war. The single largest one, at $20.8 million, was a novelty contract on whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would wear a suit. Those are mostly the kinds of contracts that regulated U.S. venues do not list. The report said Kalshi and Polymarket's compliant U.S. arm focus mainly on economic data, rate decisions, and elections, while demand for contracts tied to regime change or ceasefires has shifted to the offshore venue.
No meaningful performance edge showed up in resolved markets
The data did not show that U.S. wallets were better at picking outcomes. On resolved markets, U.S.-linked wallets backed the winning side 81.9% of the time, versus 80.3% for everyone else, with nearly identical returns if positions were held through settlement. Americans did trade more aggressively. At one point, they put 53% of their volume on a U.S. invasion of Iran, while the rest of the market was at 26%, but that stronger conviction did not translate into better results.
Allium's report points to a simple outcome: blocking U.S. access did not stop participation. It pushed the largest single national pool of political-market demand toward an offshore version of the product, visible onchain but outside direct U.S. oversight, with activity clustering in contracts that U.S. rules are less likely to permit.