NPR finds "no sign" of Polymarket at its Panama HQ address

NPR went looking for Polymarket's Panama headquarters. It's elusive

toggle caption Eliana Morales Gil

PANAMA CITY — On the 21st floor of a gleaming skyscraper in the heart of the upscale Punta Pacifica neighborhood here is the official corporate office of Polymarket, the wildly popular prediction market site that has flourished in President Trump's second term.

Polymarket, which is worth an estimated $15 billion, moved to its Panama base following scrutiny from American regulators. If Polymarket users have a legal dispute, the company's terms of service states it will be resolved in a closed-door arbitration process in Panama.

But when NPR recently visited the law office listed as its home base in Panamanian government documents, there was no sign of Polymarket, nor the entity it does business as in Panama, Adventure One QSS Inc.

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Instead, a nondescript corporate lobby opened into a large space with about a dozen unoccupied computer stations positioned in the middle of the room. An office worker said the attorney who runs the firm, Mario García de Paredes, was not available. The worker had never heard of Polymarket or Adventure One.

Public records show that Polymarket is far from alone in using this Panama City law office as a headquarters in an office park known as the Oceania Business Plaza. So do at least 15 other cryptocurrency companies, including Helix, Drift Protocol, Goldfinch and Parti, a crypto-based prediction market live-streaming site that partners with Polymarket, according to publicly available corporate records.

Court filings show the law office also did work for FTX, the now-collapsed exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was handed a 25-year prison sentence in the fraud scandal that took down the crypto empire. In a bankruptcy document detailing unpaid FTX debts, the law office is listed as being owed $13,889.

Polymarket and the other companies using the Panamanian law firm did not return requests for comment. Neither did García de Paredes when asked repeatedly for comment by NPR.

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