According to Reuters, citing sources familiar with the matter, the decentralized prediction market platform Polymarket is close to completing a funding round of up to $200 million. Once completed, the company's valuation will reach approximately $1 billion, officially entering the "unicorn" status.
This round of funding is led by billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, demonstrating the capital market's high attention to the future development of the platform.
Despite regulatory constraints, Polymarket still successfully attracts investment
According to earlier reports by Bloomberg, Polymarket had already raised $100 million before this funding round, including $50 million injected earlier this year.
In early June, Polymarket also announced a partnership with Elon Musk's social platform X (formerly known as Twitter), planning to integrate its prediction market data with the built-in Grok AI chatbot on the X platform, expanding the application boundaries of the prediction market.
However, despite attracting significant capital and partnerships, Polymarket faces strict restrictions and even bans in several countries, including the USA, France, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Belgium, and Poland.
In November last year, the FBI issued a search warrant to the platform and seized the personal devices of founder Shayne Coplan, fearing that the platform might circumvent restrictions to provide services to US users.
Declining activity, market enthusiasm faces challenges
Although its valuation has significantly increased, the trading activity on Polymarket is declining. According to Dune Analytics, as of June 24 this year, the number of daily active traders on the platform has dropped to 27,674, nearly halved from 51,930 at the end of March.
Similarly, the number of new accounts per month also plummeted from over 400,000 in February this year to less than 150,000 in May.
Nevertheless, the user base of the Polymarket platform still maintains a certain scale. Data shows that as of now, there are more than 1.18 million users on the platform, who have opened over 20 million trading positions in more than 21,000 prediction markets. These prediction markets cover global hot events, such as whether the Iranian regime will collapse this year, whether the US is about to enter a recession, and more.
The future remains controversial
The development model and financing capability of Polymarket demonstrate its huge potential as a representative of the crypto prediction market, but it also exposes the realistic challenges of regulatory risks, user attrition, and weak growth. Behind the high valuation aura, whether the platform can continue to expand compliant markets and maintain user activity will be the key factor determining its future fate.
