Polymarket review

Polymarket is an order-book exchange for binary event contracts settled on-chain in USDC. You buy shares in a YES or NO outcome at a price between 1¢ and 99¢, and that price is the market’s implied probability: a contract trading at 42¢ is the market saying roughly 42%. A correct share settles at $1, a wrong one at nothing.

Because it is an order book rather than an automated market maker, both sides are quoted independently and the two asks do not have to sum to a dollar. The gap between them is the spread, and it is your real cost on every trade — there is no separate commission line to look at instead.

Getting an account needs no identity document. Polymarket’s own sign-up guidance offers three routes in — a Google account, an email address plus a six-digit code, or a self-hosted crypto wallet such as MetaMask, Rabby or Phantom — and mentions no verification step anywhere. That is an absence of a stated requirement rather than a promise that none exists, and it is not the same thing as “no KYC”: a check can fire later, at withdrawal or above a threshold.

The headline markets carry the tightest spreads in this category, and on the contracts we track the books are genuinely two-sided rather than nominally so. When we sampled the Fed and Israeli election markets on 8 September 2026, six of eight carried live prices on both sides; the other two reported no book at all, which is the normal condition for a long-tail contract rather than a fault.

Depth thins fast away from the headline questions. A market can show a plausible price and have almost nothing behind it, so an order large enough to matter will move the price against you. Read the size beside the quote, not only the quote.

Our own live board withholds any Polymarket price older than a few minutes rather than showing a stale one, which is worth knowing when comparing our figure against the venue’s: if we show nothing, it means we would rather print nothing than a number that has stopped being true.

Polymarket charges taker fees on selected market categories. Makers pay no trading fee under its published schedule. Read the current parameters for the specific market before placing an order.

The spread, trading fee and any funding or intermediary charges all affect the cost of a position. A displayed probability alone does not show the price available for your order size.

Resolution is the part of a prediction market that decides whether the price meant anything, and it is where the differences between venues are sharpest. Polymarket publishes resolution criteria per market, and those criteria — not the market’s title — are what the contract settles on. Two markets with almost identical titles on two venues can settle differently, which is exactly why this site will not put a Polymarket price beside another venue’s until an editor has confirmed both sets of criteria describe the same event.

Where a market cites an external source, that source becomes the arbiter. Its Fed markets, for example, name a specific federalreserve.gov release; a reader who disagrees with a settlement is really disagreeing with that document.

The geographic policy distinguishes complete blocks, close-only access and frontend restrictions. Close-only permission is not permission to open new positions. Rules can apply to a province or region as well as a whole country.

This review concerns polymarket.com. Polymarket US is a separate product. Use the dated country findings and official sources above; an unlisted country is not automatically verified as eligible.