Polymarket adopts casino-style self-exclusion and deposit limits

Polymarket rolled out a set of responsible trading tools on September 30 that look a lot like what licensed iGaming operators have run for years: self-exclusion, deposit limits, and a direct line to mental health support for users showing signs of compulsive behavior. Users can now shut themselves out of the platform for 30 days, a year, or permanently, and the restriction can’t be reversed early just by changing your mind, it runs for the period selected. US users specifically get daily, weekly, and monthly deposit limits that apply no matter which funding method they use. Lowering a limit takes effect immediately, but raising one or removing it entirely requires sitting through a cooling-off period first, the same asymmetry regulated casinos build into their own limit systems specifically so a bad night doesn’t undo a decision made with a clear head.

Alongside the trading controls, Polymarket launched a Trust and Safety Center consolidating its rules on market integrity, user protection, and content moderation in one place, and it’s expanding a dedicated Trust and Safety team to oversee both the US and international sides of the platform. The company also partnered with Birches Health, which it describes as the largest national provider of behavioral and process addiction treatment, to connect users showing compulsive trading patterns with actual clinical support rather than just a help-line number buried in a footer. A co-branded “Trading Responsibly” guide rounds out the rollout, built around a four-question self-assessment users can run on themselves before a habit becomes a problem.

Polymarket’s global head of trust and safety, Malea Otranto, called these measures “the floor, not the ceiling,” language that leaves room for more restrictions later rather than framing this as a finished policy. The timing isn’t happening in a vacuum: Polymarket is currently facing a lawsuit in New York alleging it operates as an unlicensed gambling platform, and these protections arrive as prediction markets more broadly keep getting compared to the betting products they increasingly resemble. Nothing in the announcement ties the rollout directly to that case, but a prediction market voluntarily adopting the exact playbook licensed sportsbooks use for player protection is hard to read as coincidental given where the legal pressure is coming from. Polymarket has spent the past year expanding its product lineup aggressively; this is the first time it’s matched that pace with safeguards built for the same audience.