Polymarket Targets China With Lunar New Year Bets

Posted on: February 18, 2026, 12:38h. 

Last updated on: February 18, 2026, 12:38h.

Philip Conneller @casinoorgphilc Read More
Expertise: Gaming Business, Regulation, Tribal Gaming.
  • Polymarket hires Mandarin staff, builds Chinese-language interface
  • Spring Festival Gala bets draw significant trading volume
  • China bans gambling and crypto trading for mainland users

Polymarket appears to be testing whether its crypto-based prediction market model will fly in one of the world’s most tightly regulated gambling environments.

Polymarket, China gambling ban, Spring Festival Gala, crypto prediction markets, USDC
Polymarket’s China-facing strategy highlights tensions between crypto markets and state regulation. (Image: AI/Polymarket)

The New York-based company has been recruiting Mandarin-speaking staff and adding China-focused markets as part of a broader push into Asia, according to tech news site Rest of World.

Justin Yang, who is working on Polymarket’s market-entry strategy in Asia, told the outlet China was a “very important geography” for the prediction platform, adding that a Mandarin-speaking team was working on a Chinese-language interface while monitoring China search trends for new market ideas.

Polymarket’s own website already shows a Chinese-language experience at a “/zh” address, including navigation labels in simplified Chinese and a disclaimer differentiating its international platform from “Polymarket US,” which is a CFTC-regulated contract market.

Robot Dancers

Recent China-centric contracts have included which “robot dancer brands” would appear at the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, the New Year’s Eve spectacle shown on state-controlled TV channel CCTV. The show routinely draws enormous audiences, and – yes – humanoid robots performing choreographed routines is a Spring Festival thing.

Polymarket’s market page shows $594,448 in volume on the contract and indicates the final outcome resolved “Yes” for several brands, including Unitree Robotics, GALBOT, MagicLab, and Noetix Robotics.

Another market asked whether veteran Chinease singer Li Guyi would perform at the Gala.  Polymarket’s page shows $42,872 in volume and that the contract resolved “No.”

The bigger story here is not dancing robots but regulatory friction. Mainland China is not an open market for wagering. Gambling and betting are illegal there outside state-run lotteries, and the politburo in Beijing is unlikely to buy into Polymarket’s schtick that it offers not gambling but a form of event-based derivatives trading that merely aggregates market sentiment.

Diaspora Focus

Even if Beijing did accept this, the platform would probably still run into China’s bans on crypto transactions and unlicensed cross-border financial services.

Speaking to Rest of World, Yang was eager to frame Polymarket’s China push as a bid to attract the Chinese diaspora across the world rather than the mainland market. The site is blocked by mainland authorities, but Chinese citizens could overcome this with a VPN.

Yang said he did not have precise figures for users located within mainland China but noted that the platform attracts millions of visits each month from across Asia and processes trades totaling hundreds of millions of dollars monthly from the region.