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Per Panamanian government documents, Polymarket is registered at the address of a law firm in an office park in Panama City under its corporate name, Adventure One QSS. Its terms of service require disputes with the company to be hashed out in Panama, behind closed doors.
What doors exactly? That's unclear. When the broadcaster sent a journalist to its Panama address, there was no sign of the company: Just an empty room without about 12 unused computers and a single office worker who told the reporter they had never heard of Polymarket or Adventure One. The person said the lawyer whose firm it is, Mario García de Paredes, was not available.
That lawyer, and his firm, have deep roots in the worlds of cryptocurrency – including some of its most rotten parts (1).
Polymarket and the problems with prediction markets
Polymarket is a digital platform worth an estimated $15 billion that lets users combine two highly volatile, risky financial instruments: prediction markets and cryptocurrency. You can use it to place crypto bets on everything from which country will win Eurovision (2) to whether that cruise-ship outbreak will result in a hantavirus pandemic (3).
It was once based stateside, but in 2022, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) ordered it to wrap up its U.S. operations and pay a $1.4-million fine for running an unlicensed exchange (4). Polymarket decamped to Panama, but was soon under scrutiny once again from multiple U.S. regulators about whether it broke the terms of the deal and continued to let Americans use the platform.
But its fortunes changed after the 2024 presidential election. Trump administration regulators closed their investigations, and opened a path for Polymarket to come back to the country by approving its purchase of Florida-based exchange and clearinghouse QCX (5).
Polymarket is still unavailable in the United States, but it expects to return soon, and has put a page up on its website for Americans to sign up for a waiting list to get back in (6).
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The first family seem to be fans: Donald Trump Jr., the president's son, has invested millions into Polymarket through his firm and is an adviser to the company (he advises its legal U.S. competitor, Kalshi, too (7)).
In the meantime, Americans have found ways to skirt the rules, such as by changing their IP address to another country using a virtual private network (VPN) (1).
That appears to be how U.S. soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke allegedly placed a $32,500 bet that Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro would be out of office by the end of January 2026 — the day before he was seized by U.S. special forces. He won $409,000 on that wager, but now faces a slew of charges, including wire fraud and unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, according to BBC reporting (8).
The U.S. Senate banned its members and staffers from trading on prediction markets last month, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has urged members of Congress and White House leaders and staffers to do the same (9), Time reports.
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Why certain companies love setting up shop in Panama
That eerily empty law firm is in the Oceania Business Plaza, which is also listed as the headquarters for at least 15 other crypto companies, including Helix, Drift Protocol, Goldfinch and Parti, a Polymarket partner, according to NPR reporting.
Mario García de Paredes, the lawyer, also did work for FTX, the crypto exchange headed by one-time American wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried. It was exposed as a colossal fraud in 2022, landing him with a 25-year prison sentence.
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Paredes did not respond to NPR's repeated requests for comment. Neither did Polymarket, nor any other company using the address.
The mere existence of the empty office doesn't imply wrongdoing on Polymarket's part. The company never explicitly claimed to have employees in Panama, but also did not answer NPR's questions about why it chose to locate the business there.
However, the website of JJ Associates (10), a business law firm based in Panama and catering to international clients, provides some clues. It touts the country as the perfect place to "protect assets" (aka, shelter them from taxes), and boasts "zero tax on foreign income, 100% foreign ownership, and no residency requirement (11)." That goes for both income and capital-gains taxes.
The latter is particularly attractive for companies dealing in assets that may appreciate unpredictably at breakneck speed, such as cryptocurrency.
Recently, however, the country has introduced new documentation requirements and anti-money-laundering measures to crack down on bad actors (11).
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Panama is also very cheap: International Management & Trust Corp advertises that it can help Americans do everything legally needed to set up and maintain an offshore business in the country for between $450 to $1,050 USD per year (12).
Finally, according to NPR, Panama is appealing for legal reasons. Panamanian courts treat international judgments as invalid by default, unless the country's supreme court specifically chooses to validate them. If a company has been ordered to pay a big civil fine in another country, it could be hard to collect it in Panama.
It's the perfect place to locate if your business exists in a "legal and ethical grey area", as The Wall Street Journal once described Polymarket (particularly when it comes to things like betting on which country U.S. airstrikes will hit next (13)).
It's no coincidence which country was at the centre of the Panama Papers scandal a decade ago. The international investigative journalism collaboration uncovered, with help from Wikileaks documents, a massive effort to launder money and avoid taxes and sanctions. A dozen heads of state and more than 60 of their family members were implicated (14), according to BBC reporting.
– with files from Godwin Oluponmile
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
NPR (1); Polymarket (2),(3),(6); U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (4); Bloomberg (5); Kalshi (7); BBC (8),(14); Time (9); JJ Associates (10),(11); International Management & Trust Corp (12); The Wall Street Journal (13)
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Genna Buck is a podcaster and college instructor who edits for Moneywise.
