Polymarket has all but confirmed it will re-enter the U.S. during the 2025 NFL season with an ad blitz targeting Americans and a new “waitlist” for people to join by providing a phone number.
The prediction market platform, which is popular globally but has been shut out of the U.S. since 2022, recently bought a federally registered exchange through which it can offer its sports prediction market contracts. A host of ads bought by Polymarket through Meta—the owner of Facebook and Instagram—suggest an official U.S. launch is coming soon. The marketing materials feature taglines such as “BREAKING: Legal football trading is coming to ALL 50 states this fall” and “BIG NEWS Texas. Trading on football will be LEGAL this fall.”
Many of the Polymarket promotions specifically target states in which gambling is illegal outside tribal exceptions, including an ad with a map of the United States in which only states without legal sports betting are highlighted.
Like U.S. prediction market platform Kalshi, Polymarket will argue its sports contracts are a financial asset that should be overseen by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than a gambling product meant to be regulated by states. Also like Kalshi, Polymarket’s ads do little to separate themselves from traditional sportsbooks. In fact, one Polymarket ad lists contract “odds” alongside ones from DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM.
Polymarket Inc. is listed as the purchasing party for these ads, rather than Blockratize Inc., which bought nearly $1 million in Meta ads on Polymarket’s behalf last fall regarding the 2024 election. This is merely a semantic distinction, as Blockratize does business as Polymarket.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite a three-year absence from the U.S., the New York-based company remains one of the preeminent names in prediction markets because of its international popularity.
Polymarket has received three times as much Google search interest as U.S. rival Kalshi over the past 12 months, though has shrunk to 1.6 times that of Kalshi over the past 30 days. Polymarket also has larger social media followings on X and Instagram, and according to Two Circles data, more of its followers are based in the U.S. than Kalshi’s.
Amid a flurry of activity among competitors, including a FanDuel partnership announced Wednesday, Kalshi has upped its Meta advertising spending on political markets. Meta only reveals spending numbers for ads related to politics, but these can be used as a general proxy for marketing trends. From July 14 through July 26, Kalshi spent about $58,000 on these ads. From Aug. 12-18—the most recent dates with available data—it spent $132,000.
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan are also engaged in a war of words as they each try to position themselves as the prediction-market frontrunners.
After Coplan called Kalshi a “copycat” in a CNBC interview last month following the acquisition of the QCEX exchange, Mansour hit back.
“It’s super normal for competition to basically want to follow,” Mansour told Bloomberg. “And we’re excited about that competition. It’s amazing. It’s a validation of the business model. It’s a validation that the market is going to be very large, and it’s going to keep growing. We’re squarely in the lead position with a very, very strong head start because of an unwavering commitment to build it legally, build it credibly in the U.S. And now other people are trying to sort of replicate the setup and do the same exact things that we’ve done over the last few years.”
This NFL season, the companies will finally go head-to-head for U.S. consumers.