Polymarket retention outperformed over 85% of sampled crypto projects, driven by product design and targeted incentives. A cohort analysis of 275 crypto platforms found the prediction market sustained higher stickiness even as overall user counts fell through 2025.
Polymarket’s architecture combines an automated market maker (AMM) for yes/no markets, event-driven product design, and a targeted rewards program. An AMM is a smart-contract liquidity mechanism that prices trades algorithmically rather than using a central order book. The AMM sustains liquidity and makes on-chain trading straightforward, which supports repeated use.
Since 2025 the platform has offered a 4% annualized reward on certain long-term positions, funded by the platform treasury and distributed daily via hourly sampling of qualifying holdings. That incentive is aimed at offsetting the opportunity cost of holding stablecoins in long-duration markets — for example, positions tied to the 2028 U.S. presidential election — and helps anchor prices while encouraging position persistence.
A Dune and Keyrock cohort study of 275 crypto projects shows Polymarket’s retention rate exceeds that of more than 85% of peers, making retention the platform’s standout metric. The finding comes amid a mixed operational picture: robust trading volumes alongside declining monthly active users and low wallet profitability.
Drivers of Polymarket retention
Polymarket’s trading activity remained substantial even as active-user metrics weakened: trading volume across the measured period reached $7.9 billion. Monthly active users fell 57% from 454.664 in January 2025 to 193.023 by August 2025; new accounts in the same interval dropped from 408.804 to 54.257. User profitability is low: only about 12.7%–13.6% of wallets show profits, and most profitable wallets earned under $100.
The platform’s presence on the Polygon network has amplified on-chain transaction activity, contributing to a two‑year peak in Polygon transactions and benefiting from Polygon’s security and transparency attributes. However, the reward program appears more effective at retaining existing, engaged participants than at re-acquiring or onboarding broad new cohorts, a gap made more acute by regulatory and market access constraints — Polymarket has been excluded from the U.S. market since 2022.
Polymarket’s higher retention reflects product design choices — AMM liquidity, event-tied markets and a 4% annualized holding reward — that favor sustained engagement among core users, even as new account growth and overall active-user counts eased.
