By Douglas Gillison
WASHINGTON, Aug 31 (Reuters) – Prediction market company Polymarket is fully prepared to police trading on its platform as the approaching U.S. midterm elections test the industry’s controls, the company’s new global head of investigations and intelligence told Reuters.
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Polymarket is also working to keep U.S. users off its international platform, as required by an enforcement settlement it reached with U.S. regulators in 2022, said Shana Bautista, a former Coinbase analyst and FBI investigator.
“I’m confident that I’m able to get the resources and the support I need,” Bautista told Reuters in her first interview since joining Polymarket in June. “I can tell you that we have the systems in place to be able to identify anomalous activity when the midterms do come.”
Polymarket is under pressure from U.S. lawmakers worried fast-growing prediction markets are creating new avenues for insider trading and may threaten national security and election integrity — by undermining confidence in candidates and election officials or casting doubt on race results, among other possibilities. Many states are meanwhile suing to kick the industry out of sports betting.
Polymarket’s international platform settles trades on a blockchain, meaning wagers are public, although traders remain anonymous. Critics say that’s a recipe for misconduct. Bautista said Polymarket’s blockchain nevertheless provides highly valuable information about trader activity.
The company, which was founded in 2020, says it has been beefing up controls and plans to provide more transparency around how it polices wagers. It is launching a new web page explaining how it protects market integrity and cooperates with law enforcement, a spokesperson said.
Bautista said the web page will outline how Polymarket uses machine learning, blockchain analytics, trade surveillance, open source research and third-parties to spot and stop malicious activity.
“The market integrity program itself is not new, but what we’re putting on the record now is considerably more detail about how it operates,” she said.
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The company says it has referred more than a hundred cases to law enforcement. Bautista said those include a wallet used by a U.S. soldier who prosecutors say used classified information to bet on the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, and many possible insider bets on U.S. military actions in Iran that Reuters reported earlier this month.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2022 fined Polymarket for failing to register with the agency and required it to bar U.S. users, but analysts say there is evidence that U.S. users continue to trade on the platform. Bautista said she believes the company’s systems are sufficient to block the vast majority of U.S. users.
“It is difficult at scale to be able to consistently and always evade all of the guardrails we have,” said Bautista. “I do not see it being a really prevalent issue.”
Under President Trump’s administration, which has embraced prediction markets, federal regulators dropped a probe into whether Polymarket had breached the settlement. CEO Shayne Coplan said at the time that the company had been cleared of wrongdoing.
Polymarket re-entered the U.S. by acquiring a U.S.-registered exchange last year.
(Reporting by Douglas Gillison in Washington; editing by Michelle Price and Nick Zieminski)
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