JPMorgan quietly cut its banking ties with Polymarket

JPMorgan quietly ended its banking relationship with Polymarket, the decentralized prediction market platform, citing regulatory concerns, the Financial Times reported.

According to the report, JPMorgan notified Polymarket in October 2025 that the company would need to find a different banking partner, and the relationship was formally shuttered later that year. Neither JPMorgan nor Polymarket has issued a public statement explaining the specifics behind the decision, and outlets covering the story have said they reached out to Polymarket for comment without receiving a response by publication time. The gap of several months between the notification and the formal cutoff suggests the decision wasn't a sudden compliance reaction but a planned wind-down, giving Polymarket time to line up a replacement before the original relationship actually ended.

Polymarket has a complicated regulatory history in the US. The CFTC barred the platform from serving US customers in 2022 following a $1.4 million settlement over operating an unregistered derivatives venue. The company re-entered the US market in late 2025 after federal rules loosened under the Trump administration, and it has since secured an alternative banking partner, though the new lender's identity hasn't been disclosed. The timing means Polymarket lost one bank and gained regulatory access to its home market within roughly the same stretch of months, a coincidence that has fueled speculation about whether the banking exit and the US re-entry were connected, though neither company has confirmed a link between the two events.

• JPMorgan notified Polymarket in October 2025 that it needed a new banking partner, citing regulatory concerns
• The formal banking relationship ended later in 2025; neither side has detailed the specific reasoning publicly
• Polymarket was barred from US customers in 2022 after a $1.4 million CFTC settlement, then re-entered the US market in late 2025
• Polymarket has since secured an undisclosed alternative bank
• Despite the banking split, JPMorgan invited Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan to a private client conference in February 2026 and has expressed interest in underwriting a future IPO

The split reads as more contradictory than adversarial: a bank pulling back from a direct banking relationship over compliance risk while its investment banking arm keeps courting the same company for a much larger future engagement. That split isn't unusual for how large banks treat crypto-adjacent platforms broadly; regulatory risk and dealmaking interest are managed by different desks with different risk appetites. It also arrives as prediction markets face uneven scrutiny across US jurisdictions, with New York suing rival platform Kalshi over whether its contracts amount to gambling, even as the category's volumes keep climbing: the 2026 World Cup alone drove on-chain prediction markets to $20 billion in activity. A bank stepping back from routine banking services while state regulators separately question the product category underscores how unsettled the ground under prediction markets still is, even as trading volumes suggest the category isn't going away. Large banks have taken a similarly split approach to other corners of crypto over the past few years, quietly de-risking routine deposit and payment relationships with sector clients while their capital markets divisions keep pursuing the same clients for advisory work, underwriting, and other higher-margin business once the compliance risk sits somewhere else.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.