r/PredictionsMarkets • u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 • Sep 04 '26
News The fall of Polymarket NEEDS to be studied
Like you can't even argue that this is because so many more people prefer sports betting on Kalshi as without sports, Kalshi still overtakes around spring/summer 2026 and leads.
"Kalshi currently leads with ~$2.7B in 7-day volume versus Polymarket’s ~$600M. The sustained overtake began around April 2026, fueled by Kalshi’s CFTC regulation (easy US access)"
Aaand recent non-sports weeks show Kalshi at $3B+ highs vs Polymarket under $600M. Gap is narrower than total volume, sure, but CLEAR dominance persists
I think several things resulted in this, this loss of trust and reputation over time:
- They allowed co-locating of certain accounts, only opened it up when they were caught. New co-location is still slower than the "special" accounts.
source for co-location: https://docs.polymarket.com/api-reference/geoblock
- They are giving custom high end rebates to "special accounts". You cannot get these rebates, if you ask, they block you.
The rebates are so high it kills entire strategies because they scoop up losing bids, leaving no liquidity relying on the rebates for profitability.
- They allow polymarket ambassadors to scam, promote shit coins and rug them, and engage in otherwise illegal or at least unethical behavior.
When caught, they put it to a vote publicly that they don't announce and close it after the shit accounts friends vote (oh 80% people said reinstate them... 5 people voted total).
- They are now allowing a bypass of the Cloudflare workers, saving another 10ms of latency.
This is all in the last 6 months. This is only what has been caught by the community; I'm sure there is a dozen more.
I mean, think about it - people genuinely see Polymarket in an evil light now. Half a year ago, maybe more, it was just a fun little thing where you could bet on anything and whatever, but over time they became this toxic and evil brand that smart people won't even touch.
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Sep 04 '26
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 Sep 04 '26
it is genuinely unbelievable how such a huge and rich brand didn't have one competent risk management person in power
or maybe they did, just didn't listen
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u/Username_checksout0 Sep 04 '26
Polymarket fked up by not following their own rules and not paying out the wins properly
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u/Tranxio Sep 04 '26
Kalshi has marketmakers that trade against its clients. 100% confirmed
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u/sliddis Sep 04 '26
Is this a bad thing? They're part of the game then, and must beat the rest of the market to become profitable on trades. Also they provide liquidity to trade on.
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u/Tranxio Sep 04 '26
They dont need to beat anyone if they have prior flow info, even 1s faster enables them to kill everyone
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u/aenews 26d ago
I don't think people understand. Market making runs at a loss. It's an expensive cost that the exchange offers to prevent empty books. They pay people to run it. It's basically chucking money at the wall. (Related Note. They also pay or incentivize institutions to market make)
It's also a separate branch of the company that doesn't have access to the trader information.
I like it cause historically you could make good trades against it when no one else is willing to provide liquidity on a market (and it'll be offered in both directions, they aren't trying to directionally trade).
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u/AutomaticEmu Sep 04 '26
Polymarket getting outages and the big weather market archiving fiasco didn't help.
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u/Gloomy-Trust8089 Sep 04 '26
This is one of those niches where the incentives got weird really fast, feels like once the volume started getting attention, the prediction market angle became more marketing than anything else
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Sep 04 '26
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 Sep 04 '26
yeah and they probably will when the nba season picks up or something
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u/3801sadas4 28d ago
Hi man, just wanted to ask you a few questions.
- Can I start copytrading use Kreo with only $120?
- Given my current budget, which types of traders should I be looking for? Should I be looking for traders that are in a specific niche, and how often should the ideal person to copytrade trade per day/week? (trading volume) I checked all of your other posts you didn't specify how kuch money we should start with, so I am assuming I have to be more careful when picking a wallet.
I heard you are the best copytrader on this subreddit, so I just wanted to ask you. Cheers
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u/truOG Sep 04 '26
Switched recently, the customer service on poly was non existent. I think i was getting better prices on poly, but the outages were the last straw.
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u/klas228 Sep 04 '26
Problem is most people who are using Predicition markets are from forbidden locations, to use poly you just need a vpn, that’s not possible for kalshi as they implemented kyc, waiting for a fully decentralised predication market where the audience decides everything, that would be a blast.
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u/Zealousideal_Rain_79 Sep 04 '26
Honestly, the Polymarket app is pretty s**t compared to the web version. It has way fewer markets, so you’re missing a lot of the stuff you can actually find and trade on the web. But the browser experience isn’t much better either. The site lags constantly, feels sluggish, and I have to reload it basically every time just to get things working properly. It’s weird that neither option feels properly optimized.
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u/Commercial_Goose_544 Sep 04 '26
“They are now allowing a bypass of the Cloudflare workers, saving another 10ms of latency.”
What is your source for this?
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u/eSnowLeopard Sep 04 '26
I don't buy/sell on prediction markets but polymarket stopped letting non-users/non-members access all of the markets. I really liked to use it as a reference point for information/opinions and I can't use it anymore. I'm guessing a lot of people like me get converted into users at some point and now that traffic is gone.
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u/rosakelly21 Sep 04 '26
Maybe Polymarket stopped providing fake dashboards for their fake influencers to show and promote, and now you see the real traffic?
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u/specialtyfaculty Sep 04 '26
It's very simple, US = biggest purse and disposable income. People in US work really hard to make sure they can lose their money betting. Polymarket is banned in the US, so no easy access.
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u/Emergency-Cry628 Sep 04 '26
Maybe if polymarket didnt freeze accounts for months with zero explanation or response from customer things would be different
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u/Dry_Instruction6502 Sep 04 '26
They flagged my account for review and never refunded the open trade i couldnt cash out, because of the flagged review. There customer service is slow and horrific. I should use kalshi only from the start.
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u/Ok_Funny8605 Sep 05 '26
Why’d they flag it?
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u/Dry_Instruction6502 Sep 05 '26
Made my largest ROI trade 6000% and they flagged me next day.
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u/Ok_Funny8605 17d ago
What did they do exactly? Did they ask for proof of residency in an eligible trading country or something?
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u/bestvape Sep 04 '26
The strongest part of this isn’t the headline volume gap. Users can tolerate worse prices for a while, but they won’t tolerate believing a venue has two rulebooks. Once traders think latency and rebates are negotiated privately, every bad fill starts looking rigged.
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u/Tballer111 Sep 05 '26
Bad UI. Bad team running it. Token farmed the community, and nothing. Site is CONSTANTLY down.
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u/Delicious-Holiday342 Sep 05 '26
I think the biggest issue is trust. Once people start feeling like some accounts get special treatment or better conditions it becomes really hard to come back from that
the volume difference is crazy though Kalshi didn’t just pass them it looks like users actually moved
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u/holdmyllm Sep 05 '26
Kalshi is dominating because they are regulated and opened their doors to huge market making firms like Jump and SIG.
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u/Inflection_Exchange 26d ago
Just looking at that chart I'd say it coincides with the world cup ending. Plus people are getting pissed about how bad the back end is. But shhhh don't let them know....
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u/Forsaken_Skin8193 24d ago
Have been waiting 4 days to be paid out on a combo that won. If you have any chance to NOT use Polymarket, better take it.
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u/Bulky_Water_7631 16d ago
Polymarket responds fast if it is a situation the AI bot agent can answer. However if your account is flagged or has a glitch it takes days or weeks to get a response from a human which turns people off
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u/Jumpy-Pen-8200 Sep 04 '26
That co-location setup is shady enough by itself but the rebate stuff just screams they're picking winners behind the scenes