What if I told you the typical Polymarket user recorded a net loss of about $2 over six weeks, or that 58% had less than $100 in net gains or losses over that same period.
You would probably, well, not be shocked. And those are the main takeaways of a new Pew Research Center study of 12,000 Polymarket accounts examined from May 7 to June 19 of this year.
However, there’s the inevitable sad part, and you see it when you look at the less typical users:
Highly active users, or users who ranked in the top 11% for activity, were the ones who made 1,000 trades or more. Whereas the median Polymarket user made a trade on 10 out of the 42 days Pew studied, the top 11% made trades on 39 of those 42 days. Who needs days off?
Losses for the “typical highly active user” weren’t too terrible: only about $140, which makes sense, since most active Polymarket users come close to breaking even. But unfortunately, 33% in this category lost more than $1,000, while only 27% made $1,000.
So: No, Polymarket isn’t a huge money drain for most people who use it, but it is—as you might expect—pretty brutal for a small subset of unlucky users.
