Polymarket Pauses Trading as Prediction Market Investigates Security Incident

By Jose Antonio Lanz

Polymarket users are reporting that the prediction market’s frontend may be compromised, with assets being withdrawn from accounts without permission.

The platform’s status page shows its trading API in a major outage and the exchange in cancel-only mode, meaning traders can pull existing orders but not place new ones. Relayer actions, which submit users’ signed transactions to the blockchain, are also paused.

Polymarket later confirmed that one its third-party providers was compromised. "We have referred this to relevant law enforcement," the company said on X. "Anyone who has been impacted will be made whole."

Arkham data shows that a wallet identified as the suspected attacker’s, 0x3F99139F1C5854bb628c2e576Aaf638e99dFfc18, holds about $2.65 million in POL, Polygon’s native token. It received multiple recent swaps from USDC.e, a bridged version of the USDC stablecoin, into POL through Relay, a cross-chain swapping service.

The first transactions began about an hour ago, and the wallet has shown no activity in the last five minutes.

Researchers at Hudson Rock said a script loaded from DebugBear, a web performance monitoring service, contains code that looks for a logged-in user’s trading session and attempts to sell their positions and transfer the assets.

The firm said the same wallet address is hard-coded in the script as its fallback recipient, and that Polymarket’s production site code records the script’s removal. Hudson Rock said it has not established how the compromise started or how many users were affected.

Polymarket has not yet said what caused the incident. In May, a private key compromise drained roughly $700,000 from an internal top-up wallet. A month later, a compromised third-party vendor let hackers inject malicious code into the frontend and steal about $3 million from fewer than 15 accounts, and Polymarket promised to refund users in full.

Editor's note: This story was updated after publication for clarity and to include additional details from Polymarket.

Recommended News