Polymarket rolled out a new feature called Polymarket Squads on September 8, 2026, and it changes how people use the app with friends. Squads turns the group chats where people already argue about sports, politics, and crypto prices into a shared trading space built directly into the platform. It is a small addition on paper, but it says a lot about where the company wants prediction markets to go next.
What Squads Actually Does
Squads lets users create private groups inside the US Polymarket app and invite friends to join. Inside a group, members can chat about markets, share the positions they have taken, and post combos they think are worth following.
Everyone still trades through their own account. Squads does not pool money or let one person place bets on behalf of the group. It just makes it easier to see what friends are backing and jump into the same market with a couple of taps.
That distinction matters. The feature is closer to a social feed layered on top of trading than to true copy trading, where one wallet’s moves get mirrored automatically into another. We broke down how that mechanic works in our guide to copy trading on Polymarket, and Squads is a lighter, manual version of the same idea.
Why Squads Is Landing Right Now
The timing is not an accident. Squads launched days before the NFL season kicked into full swing, when group chats about game lines and player props are already at their busiest.
Polymarket paired the launch with a new ad campaign called Polymarket HQ, directed by Peter Berg and fronted by a lineup of sports and culture names including LeBron James, Eli Manning, Derek Jeter, Spike Lee, Sue Bird, Richard Sherman, and Rajon Rondo. Travis VanderZanden, Polymarket’s Chief Growth Officer, said the goal is to formalize behavior that was already happening off-platform. “People are constantly debating what’s going to happen next with their friends and sharing predictions in group chats. With Squads, we’re bringing the conversation and trading together,” he said in the official launch announcement.
Squads also follows the recent rollout of Polymarket Perps, a separate product offering leveraged trading on crypto, stocks, and commodity prices. Between the two launches, Polymarket has added a social layer and a leverage layer to its platform inside the span of a single week.
Squads and the Kalshi Race
Both moves land at a moment when Polymarket needs a growth story. Combined trading volume across Kalshi and Polymarket fell 14.5% in August to roughly $45.33 billion, the first monthly decline in a year, according to data reported by The Block. Polymarket’s own US volume dropped more sharply than Kalshi’s over the same stretch, as the World Cup boost that drove record trading in June and July faded.
Polymarket also named its first chief financial officer this week, hiring finance veteran Warren Jenson to build out the company’s capital strategy. Taken together, a new CFO, a leveraged trading product, and a social feature built for football season all point the same direction: Polymarket is trying to widen its lead over Kalshi on engagement, not just raw trading volume. We covered how the two platforms stack up more broadly in our Polymarket vs Kalshi comparison.
What Squads Means for Everyday Users
For casual users, Squads is mostly a convenience feature. It saves the step of screenshotting a position from the app and pasting it into a separate group chat somewhere else.
It also introduces a new kind of social pressure. Seeing three friends pile into the same market can feel like a signal, even when none of them have done more research than a hot take during the game. A shared position is not evidence a bet is correct, and a group of friends backing the same outcome can just as easily be wrong together as right together.
Squads works best as a way to keep a running conversation with people you already trade around, not as a shortcut for picking markets. Anyone using it seriously should still be checking prices and liquidity the same way they would on their own, rather than following the group by default.
What to Watch Next
Squads is currently limited to the US Polymarket app, so international users trading through VPNs or alternative access points will not see it yet. Whether the feature expands globally likely depends on how much it moves engagement numbers over the next few months, especially once the NFL season is in full swing and football-related markets are drawing heavier traffic.
If Squads succeeds at pulling more casual bettors into daily trading, expect Kalshi to respond with something similar. Prediction market platforms have been quick to copy each other’s product moves this year, from parlay-style combo bets to leveraged trading, and a social layer is a logical next feature for a rival to match.
