Polymarket pauses trading after $2.65M exploit

Polymarket put its exchange in cancel-only mode on Oct. 29 after roughly $2.65 million was drained. According to its status page, at 2:05 PM ET the platform said order cancellations still worked while new trades and relayer actions were paused. At 2:37 PM ET it said one of its third-party providers had been compromised and the matter was referred to law enforcement.

Details

The Block, citing Arkham data, reports that a suspected attacker's wallet holds about $2.65 million in POL after several USDC.e-to-POL swaps through Relay. Polymarket has not named the provider or given a total loss figure. One trader told The Defiant they lost about $800,000.

In a post on X cited by PANews, Polymarket said it identified and fixed an issue on its international platform, polymarket.com, and that all affected users will be fully compensated. It said trading would resume at about 3 PM ET.

What it means for the market

The incident comes two days after reports that the CFTC reopened its Polymarket probe. It is a reminder that a weak third-party service can hurt users even when the platform's own contracts are intact. Details of the investigation are not public yet, and we will update this story.

We use Polymarket odds in our daily brief; data may lag while trading is paused.

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