Polymarket taps Chainalysis for on-chain surveillance to hunt insider trades

Polymarket partners with Chainalysis to deploy on-chain surveillance targeting insider trading and manipulation as volumes hit $7B monthly and regulation intensifies.

Polymarket has partnered with Chainalysis to deploy what it calls “a first-of-its-kind on-chain solution to monitor trading activity and enforce its Market Integrity Rules” across its DeFi prediction market platform, formalizing a surveillance layer explicitly designed to identify insider trading, fraud, and manipulation in real time.

In the announcement, Polymarket said that because “every trade, position, and settlement is recorded on a public blockchain,” that transparency can now “be harnessed to set a new public standard for market integrity in prediction markets and beyond,” with Chainalysis providing anomaly detection tuned to patterns “consistent with insider knowledge in prediction markets.”

Chainalysis system targets insider trading on-chain

The agreement spans multiple Chainalysis product lines, including investigative tools to create “blockchain-verified evidence for proactive and reactive engagement with law enforcement,” on-chain threat prevention, and professional services to “develop new detection capabilities and support complex investigations” as new abuse patterns emerge.

Polymarket framed the message bluntly, stating that the enhanced monitoring “sends a clear signal: insider trading, in addition to all types of fraud and market manipulation, is not welcome on Polymarket, and those who attempt it will be identified,” positioning the platform as a test case for what “market integrity can look like in an on-chain world.”

The Chainalysis deployment builds on a March update in which Polymarket published enhanced Market Integrity Rules and highlighted a “multi-layered monitoring system” on its Polygon-based DeFi venue, where all holders in each contract and their positions are publicly viewable and suspicious activity can trigger reviews, bans, and referrals to law enforcement.

Upgrade, volumes, and pUSD collateral

The integrity rollout follows Polymarket’s April 28 exchange stack upgrade, described internally as its “most significant overhaul” to date, which introduced CTF Exchange V2 smart contracts, a rewritten central limit order book engine, and Polymarket USD (pUSD) as a new collateral token.

According to Polymarket’s documentation, pUSD is “a standard ERC-20 token on Polygon, backed 1:1 by USDC,” with the backing “enforced onchain by the smart contract — no algorithmic peg, no fractional reserve,” while all trading still settles in native USDC to improve capital efficiency at the settlement layer.

The platform is migrating off bridged USDC.e toward pUSD issued directly against Circle’s USDC, a shift Polymarket says is designed to cut failed trades, lower gas costs, and improve order management, with most users handled automatically via a one-time approval prompt and API traders required to reconfigure clients for the new contracts.

This infrastructure push is happening against a backdrop of explosive growth: Polymarket set a new all-time daily volume record of about $425 million on February 28, surpassing its prior high from the 2024 U.S. election, while February’s total volume topped $7 billion — roughly a 7.5x year-over-year jump, according to on-chain analytics cited by multiple research firms.

Regulatory and compliance pressure around prediction markets is intensifying as well, with recent analyses noting that by early 2026, platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi were outlining fresh insider trading controls and governance restrictions as the broader sector scaled toward roughly $21 billion in monthly volume, making robust surveillance a prerequisite for institutional participation.