David Yaffe-Bellany

It's only open to foreign users.

Well, the legal landscape in the U.S.

was complicated.

And so on some level, it might have seemed actually less risky to sort of try its luck outside of the U.S.

But the other element to this is that there was a workaround.

If someone really wanted to use Polymarket from inside the United States, they could download a VPN, a virtual private network, and essentially trick the website into thinking that they were logging on from another country.

And this was extremely easy to do.

I've spoken to many people who did it

I've spoken to at least one former Polymarket employee who told me that it was sort of an open secret in the office that people were doing this.

And it meant that this U.S.

ban was largely theoretical.

At this point, it's still primarily a base of tech savvy people who are really interested in these things in kind of a nerdy way.

Got it.

To use Polymarket, you had to use cryptocurrencies.

So you're already limiting yourself to a pool of people who are comfortable transacting in crypto.

In your world.

In my world, yeah.

And if you wanted to use it in the US, you had to know how to use a VPN.

So it's not as if this was freely available to anyone who might potentially be interested.

They are starting to do that.