There are just a few days left before the most awaited presidential election of the year and the polls still show a very close race between the two candidates: former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris.
It’s in this divisive and uncertain context that increasingly more people in the US have been turning to the best VPN apps to access Polymarket, a popular online betting and prediction platform, to bet on who’s going to be the winner.
“General industry data shows that VPN usage in the US has risen by approximately 15-20% in the last year alone, with prediction markets being one of the contributing factors,” PureVPN reported on Thursday, October 31.
What’s behind the spike in US VPNs?
A VPN, short for virtual private network, is a security software that encrypts your internet connections to prevent third-party snooping and spoofs your real IP address location to grant you access to otherwise geo-restricted content. The latter skill is exactly why the usage of US VPN services has been spiking lately.
In the United States, online gambling is regulated by a fragmented system, which includes the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006. Prediction platforms like Polymarket fall into a grey area as, despite betting being distinct from traditional gambling, they still have to follow the same rules.
“However, the growing demand for prediction markets suggests that there is significant interest in these platforms, which VPNs are helping to fulfill,” noted PureVPN.
As the image above shows, Google searches for Polymarket VPNs began spiking in the middle of October, about a month before the big day.
By connecting to a VPN server located in a country where the platform operates legally, users in the US can access Polymarket and place bets if they wish to do so.
VPN services are also handy tools to boost users’ privacy when browsing the web. This is because they encrypt all the data leaving a device into their VPN protocol so that third parties are prevented from seeing the content of your internet connections.
Similar to the Polymarket use case, streaming VPN services are increasingly popular among people in the US and beyond who want to access foreign catalogs within a couple of clicks.