Polymarket restores international trading after wallet theft
The company says it is returning $3.9 million to traders after the October 29 attack and had fully refunded 95% of affected wallets by the following afternoon.
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The company says it is returning $3.9 million to traders after the October 29 attack and had fully refunded 95% of affected wallets by the following afternoon.
Polymarket halted trading on its international exchange on 29 October after traders reported unauthorized withdrawals. The company said it fixed the issue on its end and resumed trading at 15:00 Eastern time (23:00 Yerevan time) that day.
The attack followed a separate third-party compromise in June 2026, when Polymarket said a compromised provider had injected a malicious script into its website for some users. The company said it removed the code and promised affected users full refunds.
Polymarket lets people trade on the outcomes of events such as elections and sports. Its international exchange operates as a decentralized-finance platform on the Polygon blockchain, a shared digital transaction record, and is not regulated in the US. The company’s separate US platform was not compromised.
Polymarket said it was returning $3.9 million: $2.7 million for the attack and $1.2 million for losses related to the trading pause. By the afternoon of 30 October, it said 95% of affected wallets had been fully refunded, including reimbursements for drained wallets and goodwill payments.
In an analysis of public data supplied to CNBC for its October 30 report, analytics firms Betting Intelligence and Polysights found that one account withdrew at least $2.7 million across 710 other wallets. The total number of affected users is unknown; the analysis counted wallets, not people.
Polymarket told users that funds taken from wallets with losses below $10,000 would be restored by 30 October. Traders who had more than that amount withdrawn would need to sign a release form to receive reimbursement.
The company said it would reimburse positions moved or forcibly sold at their value when taken, including any loss caused by a sale at a worse price. For positions held when trading paused, it said it covered the difference from their value at the pause if they lost value because a market ended during the interruption or the trader sold immediately after reopening.
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Polymarket said an attacker compromised a third-party provider and replaced its website performance-monitoring script with malicious code. For some people who had the site open during a short window, the code used their active sessions to sell positions and move funds from their wallets.
An unnamed person familiar with the matter told CNBC that the issue stemmed from a hack of DebugBear, a website performance-monitoring platform. DebugBear separately said it had experienced a security incident on 29 October.
Polymarket said it removed the compromised script, cleared cached data and reset active login sessions. It also paused trading and the service that relays transactions before reopening, and said it was adding integrity checks and continuous monitoring to third-party scripts.
The company said it had referred the case to law enforcement and was cooperating with authorities while conducting its own investigation. CNBC’s unnamed source said the referral was to UK authorities because DebugBear is based there.
Polymarket said it identified eligible wallets using blockchain and trading data without requiring a claim. Traders who believe a payment is missing or incorrect can fill out the form referenced in the company’s incident update for a review.
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