Polymarket’s native collateral token pUSD has crossed the $500 million market value threshold, a milestone that arrived roughly a month after the token’s public rollout on April 28. The ERC-20 token, which lives on the Polygon network, now has a circulating supply of approximately 490 million tokens.
What pUSD actually is and why it matters
Users deposit USDC, and they receive pUSD at a 1:1 ratio. That pUSD then becomes the collateral used to place bets across Polymarket’s prediction markets. When they want to cash out, the process reverses: pUSD goes back, USDC comes out. Every pUSD in circulation is backed by an equivalent amount of Circle-issued USDC held in smart contracts.
The token initially launched around March 31, with a broader public rollout coinciding with Polymarket’s upgraded trading engine on April 28. That engine, called CLOB v2, is a rewritten central limit order book designed to handle the platform’s growing volume.
The platform’s Total Value Locked has surged in tandem with the pUSD rollout, reaching approximately $514 million in late April.
Polymarket’s growth trajectory in context
Polymarket has been reporting monthly notional trading volumes in the billions. Annualized revenues are reportedly in the hundreds of millions. The platform’s user base has grown to approximately 1.35 million active users.
What this means for investors and the broader market
At $490 million in supply, pUSD has become one of the larger single-protocol sinks for Circle’s stablecoin, with every pUSD minted representing a dollar of USDC locked up and removed from general circulation.
Polymarket is expected to introduce a POLY governance token, with speculation about airdrops targeting the platform’s 1.35 million active users. That behavior tends to inflate TVL and volume metrics in the short term, so it’s worth watching whether the $514 million TVL figure holds steady or continues climbing as governance token rumors intensify.