NEW YORK – JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, in October 2025 over regulatory concerns, the Financial Times reported Thursday. What the bank did not do is cut off contact.
Four months after ending the banking relationship, JPMorgan invited Polymarket chief executive Shayne Coplan to address a private client conference. The bank has also signaled it may pursue an underwriting role if Polymarket proceeds with an initial public offering. JPMorgan declined to comment on the report. Its posture toward Polymarket, severed at the balance sheet, intact at the relationship level, captures the peculiar friction Wall Street now faces with the prediction market industry it helped legitimize.
Polymarket disputed the characterization of a clean break. The company told the Financial Times it continues to maintain “a close, active relationship with JPMorgan across multiple entities, operational integrations and material handling of customer fund flows.” The nature of those operational integrations, and which JPMorgan entity maintains them, was not clarified.
The debanking reflects a regulatory concern that predates JPMorgan’s own warming toward the sector. Polymarket was barred from operating in the United States in 2022 following a $1.4 million settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which found the platform had operated an unregistered derivatives trading venue. The settlement required Polymarket to block American users; for three years, the world’s largest prediction market ran effectively as a geography-restricted product, accessible globally but not domestically.
That changed in late 2025. The Trump administration’s loosening of digital asset regulation reopened the American market for prediction platforms. Polymarket began accepting American users again, entering a domestic landscape that included formalized competitors such as Kalshi, which operates under direct CFTC supervision. The re-entry allowed JPMorgan to justify deepening its involvement, but apparently not at the bank account level. JPMorgan’s October 2025 notification to Polymarket arrived months after the re-entry, suggesting the bank’s compliance review of a now-American-facing business produced conclusions that an offshore-only one had not.
The Financial Times report does not identify which specific regulatory concern triggered the notification. Banks operating under federal Bank Secrecy Act obligations must justify their customer relationships to regulators, and clients with past enforcement actions, even settled ones, require additional scrutiny regardless of their current legal standing. Polymarket’s $1.4 million CFTC settlement and its history of operating outside American regulatory frameworks placed it in a category of elevated compliance risk that JPMorgan’s risk team apparently could not clear, even as the regulatory environment around prediction markets was formally improving. The Trump White House is scheduled to host crypto and prediction market executives on August 19, a gathering that will proceed with the JPMorgan-Polymarket debanking now part of the public record.
Polymarket has secured a replacement banking partner, according to the FT. The identity of that partner was not disclosed. The transition did not appear to interrupt operations: the platform continued trading throughout the period since JPMorgan’s withdrawal, and its standing as the dominant prediction market by volume remains intact. The multi-billion dollar prediction market industry, in which sports betting accounts for the largest share of trading activity, has continued growing through the period of regulatory uncertainty that the JPMorgan relationship captures.
JPMorgan’s continued courtship of Polymarket for investment banking work speaks to the broader calculation driving Wall Street toward the sector. The transaction and advisory fees associated with a Polymarket initial public offering would be substantial. The bank that terminates a client’s commercial banking on regulatory grounds may face an awkward conversation when it later pitches that same client for a lead-left underwriting role. That conversation is now part of the Polymarket record, according to people familiar with the situation cited by the Financial Times. Whether JPMorgan’s regulatory discomfort with Polymarket’s deposit-taking business translates into a conflict with a securities underwriting mandate is a question for outside counsel, and for whatever bank eventually leads the offering.
The debanking of crypto and prediction market firms by major American banks has been a recurring feature of the sector’s domestic struggles. The pattern, a bank exiting a client relationship over compliance exposure while quietly maintaining softer ties, is not unique to Polymarket. What distinguishes the JPMorgan situation is the scale of the platform involved and the explicit pursuit of future business. The New York City Council opened a separate inquiry into Polymarket in August, examining whether the platform had distributed fake trade videos and placed predatory advertising targeting young users, an investigation that runs parallel to questions about its regulatory status and adds another layer of institutional scrutiny.
The CFTC’s position on prediction markets has evolved rapidly under the Trump administration. The agency is convening its inaugural digital asset advisory committee the day after the White House meeting, as it prepares broader regulatory guidance for a sector that now includes publicly traded derivatives exchanges, offshore platforms operating onshore, and a growing list of banks calculating how much of this business they can safely hold. New York’s $36 billion lawsuit against Kalshi for illegal gambling illustrated how contested that question remains at the state level, even as federal regulators move toward accommodation.
What the JPMorgan-Polymarket episode does not settle is the durability of prediction markets’ American re-entry. The regulatory opening that allowed Polymarket back into the United States in late 2025 is a product of the current administration’s posture. The banking relationship that JPMorgan concluded was not acceptable at the compliance level is a product of federal statutes that did not change when the administration changed. Polymarket has a new bank, a robust regulatory argument, and an invitation to the White House. It no longer has JPMorgan’s commercial banking account. Whether the industry reads that as a warning or a rounding error may depend on what comes out of next week’s meetings.
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