Polymarket has already built the surveillance machinery it needs to police dirty trading before Americans vote in the midterms, the prediction market operator’s newly hired intelligence chief told Reuters, casting the election season as the sternest test yet of the industry’s guardrails.
Shana Bautista, a former Coinbase analyst and FBI investigator who joined the company in June, offered the reassurance as U.S. lawmakers press the argument that fast-growing prediction markets hand insiders fresh routes to trade on non-public information and could erode national security and election integrity.
The scrutiny tracks a sector still climbing fast, ranking among the fastest-growing corners of digital assets even as a wider crypto downturn drained trillions of dollars from the market. Several states are separately trying to force the industry out of sports betting, so Polymarket must defend its controls on more than one front.
What Polymarket Is Watching For
“I’m confident that I’m able to get the resources and the support I need,” Bautista said in her first interview since taking the role, adding, “I can tell you that we have the systems in place to be able to identify anomalous activity when the midterms do come.” Part of the work involves shutting U.S. traders out of Polymarket’s international venue, a requirement baked into the enforcement settlement the company struck with regulators in 2022.
A spokesperson said Polymarket will publish a web page spelling out how it defends market integrity and works with law enforcement, blending machine learning, blockchain analytics, trade surveillance, open source research and outside vendors to flag bad actors. Bautista noted that:
“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.”
Polymarket says it has passed more than a hundred cases to law enforcement, among them a wallet prosecutors link to a U.S. soldier accused of using classified information to bet on the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.
Regulators Ease, Volumes Climb
The CFTC fined Polymarket in 2022 for operating without registering and told it to lock out American users, yet analysts say U.S. residents still find their way onto the platform. Bautista pushed back on how widespread that is. “It is difficult at scale to be able to consistently and always evade all of the guardrails we have,” she said, adding, “I do not see it being a really prevalent issue.”
The political winds have shifted her way, with federal regulators under President Trump abandoning an inquiry into whether Polymarket breached its settlement. The company then returned to U.S. soil last year by buying a domestically registered exchange. Rivals are lobbying to steer the wider federal rewrite, with the Hyperliquid Policy Center and Multicoin Capital filing a joint comment in late July arguing prediction markets fall squarely under CFTC authority.
The activity underscores how far the sector has scaled, logging roughly 12 million transactions worth $2.0 billion in volume against $1.3 billion in open interest over the past 24 hours. Kalshi accounts for the bulk of that at about $1.6 billion, with Polymarket at $275.7 million, though Polymarket’s longer record runs deep. Artemis data puts its cumulative volume at $123.3 billion and cumulative trades at 815.1 million, alongside 33,100 active markets. Polymarket has meanwhile widened its reach through an exclusive tie-up with Dow Jones Media, even as FinanceFeeds reported its active traders slipped to 643,000 this spring.
