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A Retail Participant is a person you onboard who trades through your platform. You don’t create participants directly — they are provisioned automatically when KYC is approved — so your work here is to verify identity and then read back who your Firm can act for.

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Participant lifecycle

When a Retail Participant completes KYC and is approved:
  1. Polymarket US automatically provisions their trading identity (Participant).
  2. A trading account is created for them.
  3. They can then be funded and trade.
There is no separate “create user” or “create account” call. See the KYC Verification Flow for the steps, and On-Demand Funding (Beta) for how participant trading is funded.
Terminology. These docs use Retail Participant for the end user. In API payloads the underlying field names use user/users; treat those as the Retail Participant’s trading identity. See the Glossary.

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Resolve who you can act for

You discover the identities available to your Firm with three endpoints from the Accounts API. Each links to its full API reference below; the partner-specific usage is summarized here. For the account and identity hierarchy and entitlements model, see Accounts & Identity. In partner usage, the IDs returned by GET /v1/users (for example, firms/your-firm/users/participant-123) are the values you place in the x-participant-id header to act on behalf of a specific Retail Participant.
Call GET /v1/whoami and GET /v1/users after authenticating and before trading, so you use the correct participant and account IDs in subsequent requests.

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Participant vs Account

A Participant can have multiple accounts for different purposes (e.g., separate trading strategies).