Polymarket blocking VPN users isn’t surprising anymore. What’s truly surprising is how this platform relied on users from all over the world (including many from restricted regions) to grow rapidly for so long: these users contributed massive trading volume, liquidity, community culture, and attention. Now, these same users who helped the platform thrive are suddenly being treated as a 'compliance risk.' The platform is facing legal pressure from various countries (prediction markets are considered unlicensed gambling or derivatives in many places), • Transparency should come first. You can’t 'harvest' global users for traffic and growth, then quietly tighten the rules when regulatory pressure hits. • You can’t start off branding yourself as 'the future of open prediction markets,' only to slowly morph into a 'licensed, regulated fintech app' when regulators show up. • The issue isn’t just VPNs being blocked. The bigger problem is that many users took risks to participate, only to find out the real rules after the fact. Polymarket is now blocking VPN users and implementing stricter identity verification due to increased regulatory scrutiny in dozens of countries. These compliance measures are aimed at avoiding being labeled as operating illegally. But this has left many early supporters feeling like they’ve been 'abandoned after crossing the river.'