While Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) bleeds and Strategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) slides into what Peter Schiff called a death spiral, Polymarket may be quietly running crypto’s biggest user onboarding pipeline.

A new 90-day study from Bitget Wallet shows that nearly 60% of Polymarket’s 857,377 active users had never executed a single trade on a decentralized exchange before placing a bet on the platform.

The report found that only 21% of active Polymarket users were veteran DEX traders.

Inside Polymarket’s Closed-Loop Economy

Once capital enters Polymarket, it largely stays put. Polymarket-heavy users averaged 1,215 trades on the platform over 90 days, while making just 11.9 swaps on outside decentralized exchanges over the same period.

When users do leave Polymarket to swap tokens, the flows route through Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ:COIN) infrastructure.

Base, Coinbase’s layer-2, was the second-largest destination at $352.8 million in volume, trailing only Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) and dwarfing Polymarket’s home chain Polygon (CRYPTO: POL) at $169.1 million.

Stablecoins made up 53% of users’ broader DEX volume, with memecoins at just 1%.

World Cup And Nasdaq Push Mainstream Users In

The 2026 FIFA World Cup looks like the single biggest driver of the current onboarding wave. Polymarket’s soccer category surged 300% in the tournament’s first ten days, with the World Cup winner contract alone clearing $3 billion in trading volume.

Bernstein analysts have forecast the tournament could add up to $10 billion in incremental prediction market volume.

France is currently favorite to win the World Cup, at 19%. The USA is 10th at 3%.

Sports may be pulling in casual bettors, but Wall Street is arriving through a different door.

Polymarket’s May launch of private company markets through Nasdaq Private Market lets users trade SpaceX and OpenAI valuation milestones, drawing in traditional finance users with no DeFi background.

Meta’s Arena And Security Threats

In a sign of prediction markets capturing the zeitgest, Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly directed Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) to build a standalone prediction market app called Arena, designed to compete with Polymarket and Kalshi.

Polymarket suffered a roughly $3 million front-end exploit on June 25 after a compromised third-party vendor injected malicious code into its website, its second breach in two months.

That risk falls hardest on the newcomers Polymarket spent the World Cup courting, the users least equipped to spot a wallet-signature scam.

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