Polymarket launched its first official US affiliate program in early 2026, powered by link-management platform Dub.co. The program pays $10 per first deposit and $0.01 per click to approved publishers, marking the first time the prediction-market exchange has offered a public-facing partner program in the US market.
The launch, announced through Dub.co’s partnership channels and live at partners.dub.co/polymarket, follows Polymarket’s US relaunch via its mid-2025 acquisition of QCEX. The program is the most explicit signal yet that Polymarket is treating US growth as a paid-acquisition-driven priority rather than relying solely on organic and earned-media channels.
The commission structure
Polymarket’s affiliate program operates on a two-component commission model:
- $10 per first deposit. Affiliates earn a flat commission when a referred user makes their first qualifying deposit on Polymarket.
- $0.01 per click. Affiliates also earn a per-click micro-payment for traffic delivered to Polymarket through tracked affiliate links.
The dual structure is unusual in financial-services and crypto affiliate programs, which typically pay either CPA (cost per acquisition, on a deposit or trade event) or revenue share, but rarely both alongside per-click payments. The per-click component is most often seen in content-arbitrage and display-advertising channels, where high-volume publishers can generate meaningful revenue from impressions even without conversion.
The economic implication is that Polymarket is willing to pay for top-of-funnel traffic in a way most competitors are not. A high-volume publisher driving traffic that does not convert into deposits still earns meaningful per-click income, which lowers the friction for publishers to test Polymarket as an affiliate offer alongside other monetization options.
How publishers apply
Polymarket requires affiliates to hold an active Polymarket account with a minimum $20 USDC deposit and to apply through the Dub.co partner portal at partners.dub.co/polymarket. The application process is reviewed by both Dub.co and Polymarket’s partnership team, with approved publishers gaining access to tracked links, dashboards, and conversion reporting through Dub.co’s standard affiliate-management tools.
The $20 USDC deposit requirement is a notable barrier. It is intentionally low enough to not exclude meaningful publishers but high enough to filter out applicants who have no genuine engagement with the product. The structure echoes the approach Polymarket has taken on its broader user funnel — gating early-stage participation behind small but real on-platform actions rather than offering frictionless signup-and-promote workflows.
The Dub.co partnership
Dub.co handles the technical infrastructure: link generation, click tracking, conversion attribution, publisher dashboards, and payment processing. The platform has been building out a financial-services and crypto-vertical affiliate-management stack over the past 18 months and now operates partner programs for a meaningful share of US crypto-native consumer brands.
The partnership choice signals Polymarket’s preference for a managed-infrastructure approach over building affiliate-program tooling in-house. The trade-off is familiar: Dub.co handles complexity and time-to-market, but Polymarket cedes some control over publisher experience and attribution edge cases.
“Publicly-launched affiliate programs in regulated financial-services categories used to require months of legal review and a custom-built attribution stack. Dub.co’s infrastructure has compressed that to weeks. The economic implication is that more regulated-brand affiliate programs become commercially viable than at any point previously.”
The Kalshi comparison
The most direct strategic comparison is to Kalshi, the other major US prediction-market platform, which has not launched a public affiliate program. Kalshi works with selected media partners and content creators under bespoke arrangements but has not opened a self-service partner channel of the kind Dub.co provides.
The divergence reflects two different growth philosophies. Kalshi has prioritized institutional and media-partnership channels alongside direct brand investment, with paid acquisition playing a more selective role. Polymarket, post-QCEX relaunch, is taking a more open paid-acquisition posture that prioritizes scale of publisher distribution over hand-curated partner quality.
Whether the difference reflects genuine strategic conviction or simply different competitive positions — Polymarket has more US growth headroom to make up, given its later US relaunch — is an open question.
What this signals for Polymarket’s US strategy
The Dub.co launch is the latest in a series of moves indicating Polymarket is treating 2026 as a serious US user-acquisition year. The QCEX-acquired DCM designation gives the platform regulated access. The affiliate program gives it a scalable paid-acquisition channel. Recent product investments in the trader-segment UX give the platform an updated consumer surface.
The structural challenge remains the same one Polymarket has faced since its 2022 CFTC consent order: rebuilding US brand presence and user trust in a market that has been served by Kalshi and other CFTC-regulated venues during Polymarket’s US absence. The affiliate program is one component of that rebuild, not the whole answer.
Read our full Polymarket review for current product mechanics, US contract availability, and how the platform compares to Kalshi.
What this means for Bellwether readers
Polymarket’s first public US affiliate program lowers the friction for content publishers to monetize prediction-market coverage and signals an aggressive 2026 user-acquisition posture. Publishers with relevant audience overlap should evaluate the Dub.co partner program alongside Polymarket’s other partnership channels.