Polymarket is a prediction-market exchange running on Polygon, where every market is a set of outcome shares that settle at $1.00 for the winning outcome and $0.00 for the others. Orders are matched on a central limit order book and settled on-chain in USDC.
For automation purposes the important structural facts are that markets are binary or multi-outcome sets of tokens, that matching happens on a central limit order book rather than against a bonding curve, and that settlement is on Polygon (chain ID 137) in USDC.
Recurring crypto markets — the 5-minute, 15-minute and hourly Up/Down cycles — are the ones most bots start with, because a new market opens on a fixed schedule and resolves on a fixed schedule, which makes the strategy loop easy to reason about.
Pointing a client at Ethereum mainnet instead of Polygon. The library is the same and the configuration looks right, so the failure shows up as markets that cannot be found or signatures the exchange rejects, rather than as anything that says "wrong chain".
Browse the full glossary (32 terms), the strategy database, or the build guides.
