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What is Polymarket?

Polymarket is the world's largest decentralised prediction market platform. Understanding how it works is fundamental to using Polymargin effectively.

Prediction Markets, Explained

A prediction market is a financial exchange where participants trade on the outcome of future events. Instead of buying shares in a company or a commodity, you buy shares in a specific outcome — for example, "Will the Federal Reserve cut rates in Q2 2026?" Each share pays out $1.00 if the event occurs, and $0.00 if it doesn't.

The market price of a share at any given moment reflects the collective probability estimate of all participants. If "Yes" shares are trading at 0.65 (65¢), the market is pricing a 65% probability of the event occurring. This is the same mechanism that makes prediction markets more accurate than polls, expert forecasts, and most other forecasting methods — money creates real incentive to be right.

How Polymarket Works

Polymarket operates on the Polygon blockchain. Every market is a smart contract that holds collateral in USDC. When you buy a Yes share for 40¢, you deposit 40¢ of USDC into the contract. A counterparty on the other side sells you that share — they are effectively buying the No outcome for 60¢ (the other side of the dollar).

When the event resolves, Polymarket's oracle (typically UMA Protocol) confirms the outcome. The smart contract then automatically distributes the full $1.00 per share to holders of the winning side, and $0.00 to the losing side. Settlement is trustless — it happens on-chain without any intermediary.

A Simple Example

You believe Team A will win the championship. Yes shares are trading at 30¢.

You buy 100 Yes shares for $30 USDC total.

Team A wins. Each share pays out $1.00. You receive $100 USDC.

Your profit: $70 on a $30 investment — a 233% return.

If Team A had lost, all 100 shares would pay $0.00 and you would lose your $30.

The CLOB: Polymarket's Order Book

Polymarket uses a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) — the same matching engine architecture used by professional futures exchanges. Traders submit limit orders at specific prices, and the engine matches buyers and sellers. This is different from AMM-based prediction markets and gives Polymarket tighter spreads, greater depth, and more responsive price discovery.

The CLOB API is what powers Polymargin's order book panel, real-time WebSocket price feeds, trade history, and chart data. Every piece of price information displayed on this terminal comes directly from Polymarket's CLOB infrastructure.

Multi-Outcome Markets

While simple binary markets have just Yes and No, Polymarket also supports multi-outcome events — for example, "Who will win the 2028 Presidential Election?" with a separate Yes/No market for each candidate. In a multi-outcome event, the probabilities across all candidates should theoretically sum to approximately 100%.

Polymargin's terminal displays all outcomes for a given event simultaneously on the chart, with each outcome plotted as its own colour-coded line. This makes it easy to see relative probability movements and compare outcomes at a glance.

Where Polymargin Fits

Polymarket's native interface is optimised for casual prediction market participation. Polymargin is built for a different kind of user — one who wants a professional trading terminal with the features that sophisticated traders expect: depth-of-book visualisation, multi-timeframe charting, real-time trade feeds, and eventually, leveraged exposure.

Polymargin does not replace Polymarket — it is a front-end terminal built on top of Polymarket's public data infrastructure. We have no affiliation with Polymarket and are not operated by them. Our leverage layer in its current phase is a simulation UI that models leveraged positions — it does not execute leveraged trades on-chain.

Polymarket

Order execution, settlement, custody

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Polymargin

Terminal UI, charts, order book, leverage tools

Market Categories

Polymarket hosts thousands of active markets across a wide range of categories. Polymargin's navigation organises these into: Politics, Sports, Crypto, Finance, Geopolitics, Tech, Economy, and Culture. Each category contains sub-tags that let you drill into specific topics — for example, NBA within Sports, or Bitcoin within Crypto.

Markets are sorted by 24-hour volume by default, surfacing the most actively traded events first. Volume and liquidity data are displayed on each market card so you can quickly assess market quality before entering a position.