The voice of a senior Polymarket user: In fact, we have already been surpassed by our competitors

Author: Jonah

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

I have had this article in my hands for a while now.

I have always wanted to write it, but I kept holding back, hoping things would quietly self-correct. Until this morning when Bloomberg published "Polymarket Loses Lead in Prediction Markets Due to Delays and Rebounds." To be honest, this report has already articulated most of what I originally wanted to say. So I will quote it extensively to help share some of the weight.

Polymarket is facing increasing operational setbacks in trying to reach key audiences (U.S. customers) and has now fallen behind its main competitors. From bloomberg.com

This headline is quite painful. And it should be.

Since mid-2024, I have been observing Polymarket. I agree with its vision, defending the platform during every regulatory panic, and recommending it to every trader I know. Prediction markets are one of the most important financial infrastructures of this decade, and Polymarket is the company I have always hoped would win this race.

So this is not an aggressive article. This is the kind of letter you write about something you genuinely care about.

Shayne Coplan and the entire team, we need to talk.

The Current Situation is Brutal

Let's start with the data.

Reports indicate that Kalshi's valuation is around $22 billion, while Polymarket's negotiation valuation is about $15 billion. This is a gap of about $7 billion for a competitor that was once far behind Polymarket. Year-to-date trading volume: Kalshi approximately $37 billion, Polymarket approximately $29 billion. U.S. market share: Kalshi close to 90%, while Polymarket remains stuck behind the waiting list.

A year ago, the mainstream narrative was still "Polymarket is the dominant player in prediction markets, Kalshi is the regulated stepson." Today, the narrative has completely reversed. Kalshi has become the compliant, fast-delivering, institutionally credible option, while Polymarket has become the crypto-native veteran that keeps tripping over itself.

This lead was something we had firmly in our grasp. Now, we are throwing it away.

The Platform Itself is Not Fully Operational

This needs to be said plainly: there are real issues with the core product, yet the company behaves as if everything is fine.

Last weekend, Polymarket delayed the migration to CLOB V2, the new pUSD collateral token, and the rebuilt matching engine by at least a week. To be fair, the delay itself was the right decision. The developer community has been shouting for weeks that there simply isn't enough time for a clean migration integration. Pushing a half-finished product live would have far worse consequences than delaying.

So the delay is not a problem; in fact, it is a good thing.

What is awkward is the way the announcement was made.

From what has circulated in the community: the news of the delay was first sent out on Twitter, but the initial formal migration announcement containing the migration guide had not even been released. The subsequent migration guide quoted outdated dates that had already been invalidated. Then, another correction was added on top of the correction.

Structurally, this is precisely the kind of communication chaos that a "well-organized operational machine" should not produce.

Then on Monday, a restart that was supposed to take five minutes ran for over an hour. The exchange was effectively offline during peak hours on a weekday. Just another small issue piling up.

As Bloomberg quoted a Polymarket spokesperson: you cannot "build the most interesting consumer finance product of the past few years without becoming a well-organized operational machine." This statement is correct; that is the vision. But the reality is that this machine keeps malfunctioning over avoidable small issues, and these small issues are accumulating into a pattern.

And these are not isolated incidents:

• The fee adjustments in the sports and crypto markets seem passive and poorly communicated.
• The team has repeatedly delayed the migration that was announced months ago.
• Scheduled maintenance windows consistently exceed the stated duration.
• The U.S. application has been stagnant in the "mobile-only, sports-only, invite-only" testing phase for several months, with reports of millions still on the waiting list.

"Crypto-native" should mean more transparency, resilience, and accountability than traditional platforms, not serve as a shield for poor UX and unreliable infrastructure.

The community is patient, but patience is clearly not infinite. Every outage, every missed deadline, every vague status update is pushing marginal users toward the competitor that "just works."

The Order of Priorities is Wrong

What truly broke me yesterday was this.

The platform is objectively not at 100% status. The exchange upgrade has been delayed. The U.S. application has not fully opened. A million people are lying on the waiting list. Traders in the global product were still experiencing outages on Monday afternoon.

Then yesterday, Polymarket announced the launch of perpetual contracts.

We are pricing for the future. Now you can leverage it. Perpetual contracts are coming to Polymarket. Sign up for early access.

Perpetual contracts are a great product and are definitely worth including in the roadmap in the long term. But to announce it now, or even just to announce it------just days after the infrastructure upgrade was delayed and a restart severely overran the time------while the U.S. application is still in testing, conveys only one message to most community members: a cash grab.

Perpetual contracts are the highest fee, highest leverage, and highest trading volume products in the crypto space, and they are the fastest way to extract revenue from existing users. Announcing it while the core exchange is still unstable and a million Americans are still locked out clearly indicates where the team's true priorities lie: monetize existing traders first, worry about the platform later, and push the concerns of those locked out even further back.

Whether intentional or not, this is the signal sent by this move. Revenue coverage takes precedence over product stability. Producing new fee-generating products takes precedence over improving existing products. Harvesting existing users rather than fixing the experience for everyone------both existing and waiting------is the focus.

Honestly, interpreting this as a "cash grab" might even be polite.

Look at this order. Kalshi announced its crypto perpetual contract product "Timeless": specific date, specific venue, specific launch event------April 27 in New York, a complete product, delivered a week later.

Breaking: The first CFTC-regulated prediction market exchange in the U.S. @Kalshi has chosen Pyth Pro as its exclusive data layer for its commodities market. Gold, silver, oil, natural gas, copper, corn, soybeans, wheat. This is why it matters.

Within days, Polymarket's response was......an early access registration page. No release date, no venue, no product specifications, no product itself. Just a marketing tweet, a slogan "We are pricing for the future, now you can leverage it," and a form to collect accounts.

That was not a product launch; it was a press release disguised as a launch event. When you pull out something to respond to a competitor that is clearly content-empty, you are no longer setting the pace in this race------you are chasing someone else's pace. And you still have to wait in line?

This is a track defined by Polymarket itself. Polymarket was once a pioneer, a cultural phenomenon, the reigning champion with years of first-mover advantage. And today, in the matter of derivatives release, Polymarket has become the one chasing, using a registration form as PR material, simply because Kalshi announced first.

This is the most embarrassing sentence in the entire letter, but it is also what Bloomberg's report is truly about.

The order of operations should be very simple:

1. U.S. Application. Fully open, remove the waiting list, stable operation, complete functionality. This is the biggest lever Polymarket has, yet it has been locked for several months, allowing Kalshi to gnaw at the U.S. retail market. This must be the top priority. Not second, but first.
2. Core Platform Reliability. Complete the CLOB V2 migration, smoothly transition to pUSD, no more missed maintenance windows, make the exchange something traders can "set and forget."
3. Then, only after this, expand the business scope. Perpetual contracts, new market categories, other items on the whiteboard.

The current order is reversed, and the community sees it clearly.

The Startup Phase is Over

Bloomberg's article has put on the table what the community has been discussing for months: delays, distractions, and a culture that still resembles a wild startup from 2021------even though Polymarket now sits on billions of dollars in open contracts, a major partnership with ICE, and the CFTC designation obtained through the acquisition of QCEX, as well as a partnership with MLB.

That era of wild startups is over, and it must end.

You are no longer facing a forum or a niche crypto application. You are facing a competitor with a CFTC license, institutional backing, and New York roots, delivering products on time and being taken seriously by regulators, trading counterparts, and the media.

This is the maturity phase that every phenomenal financial company must endure. Coinbase has endured it, Stripe has endured it, and every serious trading venue must ultimately stop operating like a "group chat" and start becoming------to borrow the spokesperson's own words------a well-organized operational machine.

Specifically, this means bringing in truly mature professionals in operations, risk control, and public relations. It means cutting out distractions that do not serve U.S. promotion and core stability. It means over-communicating when things go wrong, providing real retrospectives and true accountability, rather than a couple of brief status updates followed by silence.

These are not hostile demands. This is what every serious financial venue ultimately has to do. Polymarket is now one of them. Show the necessary appearance.

Why I Still Believe in Polymarket

That said, here’s why I haven’t left this platform and why I don’t believe this race is over.

ICE is on your side. Jeffrey Sprecher will not write a check for an air project. The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange, led a funding round last fall, a signal that the market has not fully priced in yet. You now have direct access to one of the world's most mature market infrastructure operators. Use it well.

The MLB partnership is a game-changing bonus. This signal indicates that the endgame here is not "just another betting app," but making prediction markets a mainstream, embedded financial infrastructure within institutional systems. Sports leagues, television networks, and traditional financial rails all converge into the same order book; this is groundbreaking. Kalshi clearly does not have this cultural reach.

The brand is iconic. Regardless, in public perception, Polymarket is almost synonymous with prediction markets. The election cycle has solidified this point, with the platform being repeatedly cited by journalists, hedge funds, and meme culture. This is a moat that most companies can only dream of.

The community is still here. Those who emerged in the early market, scaled up during the 2024 election, and stood by the platform through all the growing pains have not left. We want to win, and we want to see you win. That’s why we are writing this kind of letter now, instead of quietly migrating trading volume to another platform.

Bring Home the Victory

The truth is: Kalshi is winning this quarter, and possibly this entire year.

But Polymarket can still win this decade. The brand, partnerships, community, regulatory front obtained through QCEX, and the relationship with ICE are all still intact; nothing has been lost. They are just not being fully utilized while the team pushes the wrong things in the wrong order.

So the appeal is simple.

Fix the platform. Launch the U.S. application. Do not announce new products until the old ones are stable. Truly become the well-organized operational machine that the spokesperson talks about.

The community still stands with you, and the believers are still here. But the window to close the gap is narrower than it was six months ago, and it will be even narrower in another six months.

First, fix the platform. Then, bring home the victory.

A long-time Polymarket user writes this, hoping more than anyone else that he won't have to write such a letter again in the future.