Polymarket (POLYMARKET) on Solana

Polymarket has hired Lisa Mantil, a Goldman Sachs veteran of nearly three decades, as head of institutional growth, CNBC reported on September 29. She will lead the prediction market's push to bring Wall Street liquidity onto the platform. Most recently a Goldman partner and global head of the bank's ETF Accelerator, which helps clients launch investment products, Mantil previously worked in program trading and equities execution. Polymarket's volume has so far come mainly from retail traders, much of it in sports contracts, and the company now wants deeper institutional order flow.

The hire is one of four senior appointments Polymarket has made in about five weeks. The others include Warren Jenson, formerly finance chief at Amazon and Nielsen, as its first CFO, plus executives from Robinhood, Nasdaq and Coinbase. Polymarket now runs a CFTC-regulated US exchange, which launched in May and is separate from its on-chain international business, and it competes directly with Kalshi. Reports put the company's valuation at about $21 billion following a funding round that included 1789 Capital and Intercontinental Exchange.

New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Polymarket on Thursday, September 24, alleging that its U.S. platform is running an unlicensed gambling operation because it never obtained a licence from the New York State Gaming Commission. The complaint says Polymarket has advertised sports betting in the state since July 2025 and accepts users as young as 18, although New York requires mobile sports bettors to be 21. According to CNBC, the state is seeking triple any gains Polymarket made plus $100,000 for each attempt or offer of sports wagering in New York. James said Polymarket is "targeting the most vulnerable," and Governor Kathy Hochul said the company had "put New Yorkers at risk, especially those underage." The suit comes two months after New York filed a similar case against rival Kalshi.

Polymarket moved to shift the state's case from state court in Manhattan to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It also filed its own suit against James and officials at the Gaming Commission. Polymarket U.S. launched in December 2025 under Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) oversight, and the company argues that federal law gives the CFTC exclusive authority over prediction markets. Its complaint says the action "seeks to prevent imminent and irreparable harm arising from New York's enforcement of state gambling laws against federally regulated derivatives exchanges — enforcement Congress has expressly prohibited." The result will affect whether Polymarket can keep offering sports-related contracts in one of its largest U.S. markets. Arizona, Massachusetts, Nevada and other states have also taken legal action against prediction market operators.

The CFTC authorized three previously undisclosed investigations into potential insider trading on Polymarket between May and July 2026, according to FOIA records obtained by WIRED. The probes targeted contracts tied to presidential pardons — where traders reportedly made over $300,000 — Iran-related events where accounts generated approximately $2.4 million with an unusually high success rate, and Google's 2025 Year in Search results, where CFTC researchers were examining "additional individuals" potentially trading on nonpublic information.

The revelations come alongside two already-public enforcement actions: a Google engineer charged in May for allegedly using confidential data to profit roughly $1.2 million across 23 Polymarket contracts, and an Army service member charged in April for using classified operational information to generate over $404,000. The CFTC has not disclosed the current status of the three newly surfaced investigations.

A joint study by Yale and London Business School researchers analyzed 1.72 million Polymarket accounts across 210,322 markets over two years, finding that just 3% of traders captured 27% of all dollar profits on the platform. Using a statistical method that reruns each trader's history thousands of times to separate genuine skill from luck, the researchers identified three distinct groups: skilled traders, consistently loss-making "anti-skilled" traders, and a large majority with no consistent edge.

Yale economist Theis Jensen projects the skilled cohort will shrink from roughly 3% to below 1% as institutional competition intensifies — skilled participants effectively compete away their own edge by pushing prices toward efficiency. The finding has a structural implication for the platform: tighter spreads benefit less-informed traders by reducing the odds of repeatedly betting against sharp money, while specialists may retain advantages only in low-liquidity niche markets where large institutions avoid placing orders.

Polymarket is pricing an 83% probability of a 25 basis point rate hike at the September 15–16 FOMC meeting, with the remaining 18% reflecting a hold scenario, as of September 12. The odds have shifted sharply over recent weeks — from roughly 30% before the Jackson Hole symposium, to 50% ahead of August CPI data, and then jumping to 83% after August core CPI came in at 0.3% month-over-month against a 0.2% consensus estimate, signaling persistent underlying inflation pressure.

The episode illustrates Polymarket's growing function as a real-time macro probability aggregator. Because the 25bp hike has been priced in over two weeks of market activity, analysts note the larger price impact for risk assets like Bitcoin and XRP would likely come from the minority 18% hold scenario — an outcome that would unwind the tighter-policy expectations already embedded in current valuations.

Donald Trump Jr.'s venture firm 1789 Capital is committing approximately $300 million to Polymarket's latest funding round, which totals $1 billion and values the prediction market platform at $21 billion. The investment marks 1789 Capital's second significant bet on Polymarket — the firm previously invested $200 million in an earlier round — and Trump Jr., who sits on Polymarket's advisory board, called the platform "the largest prediction market in the world" and cited the need for U.S. access to it.

The round also includes Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of NYSE, which put in $600 million in March for a cumulative stake of $1.6 billion. Polymarket competes directly with Kalshi, which raised $1 billion in April at a $22 billion valuation, backed by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Morgan Stanley; Kalshi has since reported $4 billion in annualized revenue and is targeting a $40 billion valuation.

Polymarket's newly appointed global head of investigations and intelligence, Shana Bautista, says the prediction market platform has the systems in place to detect and respond to misconduct as the 2026 US midterm elections approach. Speaking ahead of the midterms, Bautista said the company is launching a dedicated market integrity page and uses a combination of machine learning, blockchain analytics, trade surveillance, and third-party tools to identify anomalous activity. Polymarket has already referred over 100 cases to law enforcement and says it cooperates actively with regulators.

The platform's readiness stance is significant given ongoing congressional concern that prediction markets could enable insider trading or undermine confidence in election outcomes. Polymarket, which was fined by the CFTC in 2022 for operating without registration and was required to block US users, re-entered the domestic market last year via the acquisition of a registered exchange. A federal misconduct probe that had lingered over the company was dropped under the Trump administration. With midterms approaching, Polymarket is positioning itself as a transparent, enforcement-capable venue — a direct response to the regulatory and legislative scrutiny that prediction markets face when they operate around high-stakes elections.

Roughly $1.2 million was wagered on Polymarket around the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton wildfires in Los Angeles, drawing sharp criticism from nine U.S. senators who urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to ban event contracts tied to natural disasters. The senators argued that "offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities' suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit," echoing the logic behind existing CFTC prohibitions on assassination and terrorism-related prediction markets. The CFTC already holds authority to restrict contracts deemed contrary to the public interest and has a proposed rulemaking under consideration that would clarify which event contracts are prohibited.

The Senate pressure marks a concrete regulatory risk for Polymarket. Legal experts noted that disaster markets sit in "an uncomfortable spot, both legally and reputationally," with former CFTC attorney Braden Perry flagging potential moral hazard if traders can profit from delayed or worsened outcomes. Analysts expect Congress to push for stricter frameworks within two to three years, potentially narrowing the range of contracts Polymarket can legally offer to U.S.-adjacent participants.

Polymarket has added more than a dozen prediction markets tied to Pokémon card and sealed product prices, letting traders take Up or Down positions on whether specific ungraded cards will close above or below a set price by a given date. Pricing data comes from Collectr, a collectibles app, and markets cover individual cards such as Charizard ex, Pikachu ex, and Bulbasaur alongside sealed booster boxes and premium collections. Current sentiment across most markets skews bearish, with the majority of contracts priced below 50% for gains.

The move extends Polymarket's reach well beyond its core election and crypto markets, targeting collectibles as a category with daily transparent pricing and crypto-native appeal. Trading volumes in the new markets remain modest so far, but the expansion reflects a deliberate push into consumer-facing verticals as Polymarket scales ahead of an expected activity surge in the fall—even as the platform navigates intensifying regulatory scrutiny in the United States.