Nikolas Sargeant
TL;DR
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Polymarket temporarily restricted trading after an incident involving more than $2.6 million.
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The platform entered cancel-only mode and paused relayer actions while investigating.
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Polymarket attributed the incident to a compromised third-party provider and referred the matter to law enforcement.
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The platform later restored operations and said affected traders would be fully reimbursed.
Polymarket Pauses Trading to Investigate Losses
Polymarket temporarily halted new orders and trading on Thursday after more than $2.6 million was reportedly lost within minutes.
The prediction market platform placed its exchange in cancel-only mode, allowing users to cancel existing orders while preventing new orders and trades from processing. It also paused relayer actions during the investigation.
“The exchange is in cancel-only mode. You can cancel orders, but no new orders or trades are processing,” Polymarket’s status account said on X.
Polymarket.com: The exchange is currently in cancel-only mode and relayer actions paused while we investigate an incident. We're aware of an outage and are looking into it. https://t.co/ClJffjM2r1
— Polymarket Status (@Poly_Status) October 29, 2026
The restrictions were subsequently lifted after the company said it had identified and fixed the cause.
Arkham data showed an address identified as belonging to a suspected attacker holding approximately $2.65 million in POL.
The wallet’s activity included several recent swaps from USDC.e into POL through Relay. Funds were later moved to other addresses.
The wallet balance provides a snapshot of the suspected attacker’s holdings rather than a final accounting of customer losses. Polymarket did not provide a detailed breakdown of affected accounts in the supplied statements.
Platform Blames Compromised Third-Party Provider
Polymarket said the incident originated with an external provider. “One of our third-party providers was compromised, and we have referred this to relevant law enforcement,” the platform stated.
The company said it had found the cause and fixed the issue, but did not identify the provider or explain how the compromise enabled the losses.
Polymarket later announced that the platform was back online and pledged to fully reimburse affected traders. It did not disclose a reimbursement timetable in the supplied announcement.
The disruption follows previous incidents involving Polymarket’s market-resolution and technical infrastructure.
In March 2025, the platform described an alleged governance attack involving a market on whether Ukraine would agree to President Donald Trump’s mineral deal by a specified date.
Earlier this year, suspicious outflows associated with Polymarket’s UMA CTF Adapter infrastructure on Polygon prompted an internal investigation.
