There are only a few days left until the year’s highly anticipated presidential election and the polls are still showing a very close race between the two candidates: former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris.
It is in this divisive and uncertain context that more and more people in the US are turning to the best VPN apps to access Polymarket, a popular online betting and prediction platform, to bet on who will emerge victorious.
“Overall industry data shows that VPN usage in the US alone has increased by approximately 15-20% in the past year, 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 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. This last skill is exactly why the use of US VPN services has increased dramatically in recent times.
In the United States, online gambling is regulated by a fragmented system, including the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006. Prediction platforms like Polymarket fall into a gray area because while gambling is different from traditional gambling, it still follows the same rules. to follow.
“However, growing demand for prediction markets suggests there is significant interest in these platforms, which VPNs are helping to meet,” PureVPN said.
As the image above shows, Google searches for Polymarket VPNs started to increase in mid-October, about a month before the big day.
By connecting to a VPN server located in a country where the platform operates legally, US users can access Polymarket and place bets if they wish.
VPN services are also useful tools to increase users’ privacy while browsing the Internet. This is because they encrypt all data leaving a device in their VPN protocol, so third parties cannot see the contents of your internet connections.
Similar to the Polymarket use case, streaming VPN services are becoming increasingly popular among people in the US and abroad who want to access foreign catalogs in a few clicks.