Polymarket‘s retention performance places it above more than 85% of a broad crypto sample, according to cohort analysis published in December 2025. This positions Polymarket as an outlier in user stickiness across DeFi, wallets and exchanges and raises immediate questions for market participants and compliance teams about sustainable engagement and market integrity.
Event-driven design and incentive structure
The retention conclusion derives from analytics providers that tracked monthly cohorts across 275 crypto projects, including networks, decentralized finance platforms, wallets and trading applications. Polymarket’s average retention rate exceeded that of over 85% of sampled protocols, based on monthly active-user cohorts that segment users by their first active month and track subsequent activity over time.
Polymarket’s prediction-market design ties user interaction to real-world events, creating recurrent incentives to return when elections, sports and macroeconomic outcomes are live, in contrast to more episodic speculative trading. A prediction market is a platform where users buy and sell positions on future events, converting event outcomes into tradable contracts, and Polymarket’s event-driven lifecycle and streamlined interface reduce onboarding friction relative to multi-protocol DeFi flows, improving activation-to-retention conversion. In 2025 the platform introduced a 4% annualized yield on long-term bets to encourage longer capital allocation and recurring participation, and its choice to forgo certain trading or deposit fees supports continued usage even during periods of muted spot-market volatility.
Despite superior cohort metrics, observable engagement trends show significant variability. Monthly active users reportedly fell 57% from a January peak of 454,664 to 193,023 by August 2025, while new account creation declined from 408,804 to 54,257 over the same period, even as trading volumes remained concentrated among core users and were reported at $7.9 billion. Market-integrity concerns have emerged alongside these figures: instances of suspected wash trading in some markets could distort on-chain activity metrics and artificially inflate apparent liquidity and retention, complicating interpretation of headline engagement data. The platform’s deployment on the Polygon network underpins its execution model and fee profile, shaping operational risk, settlement speed and custody arrangements.
Polymarket’s cohort performance suggests prediction markets can deliver more durable user engagement than many DeFi venues, wallets and exchanges, but this durability currently relies on concentrated activity among engaged users and incentive structures that require ongoing scrutiny from risk, compliance and treasury functions. For compliance officers and treasury managers, the key implications are monitoring user-concentration risk, addressing market-integrity signals and ensuring governance and reporting frameworks fully capture incentive-driven behaviour and its impact on platform resilience.