What Polymarket Is, and How On-Chain Changes It
Polymarket settles event contracts on a blockchain with stablecoin collateral. Here is what that architecture changes about pricing, resolution and risk.
Polymarket is a venue for trading event contracts where the contracts, the collateral and the settlement all live on a public blockchain. The trading interface looks similar to any other market. Everything underneath is different, and the differences show up in ways that matter.
The basic shape
You deposit a dollar-pegged stablecoin. You buy shares in an outcome. At resolution the winning outcome is worth one unit of that stablecoin and the losing one is worth nothing.
Prices run between zero and one and are usually shown as cents. The conversion to probability is the same as anywhere. Turning a price into a probability.
What is actually on-chain
The collateral. Held by a smart contract, not by a company on your behalf. How the collateral works.
The outcome tokens. Each position is a token you hold. Full sets of outcome tokens can be minted from collateral and redeemed back to it, which is the mechanism that keeps the prices of a complete set summing to one.
The resolution. An oracle reports the outcome and the contract pays accordingly. How resolution works.
Not the order book. Matching generally happens off-chain for speed and cost, with settlement on-chain. The order book covers what that hybrid means in practice.
What changes because of this
Resolution is by declaration and challenge, not by filed rules. An oracle proposes an answer, a challenge window opens, and a dispute mechanism exists if someone objects. This is more flexible than a pre-filed rule and less predictable. Most markets resolve uneventfully; the interesting cases are the ones that do not. Disputes is that story.
The listable set is wider. Without a regulator approving each contract, questions can be listed that no filed-rules venue would carry. That is genuinely useful coverage, and it is also where the worst-specified questions live.
Your keys are your access. Self-custody means no password reset. It also means nobody legitimate will ever need your seed phrase. This site never asks for one, never handles one, and no tool that shows you prices has any reason to want one. Treat any request for a seed phrase or private key as hostile, without exception.
Costs have a different shape. Trading fees, network costs and the mechanics of moving collateral are a different set of frictions from an exchange's fee schedule. Fees and gas.
Reading Polymarket prices
The participant mix skews toward people who are comfortable holding stablecoins and following politics and crypto closely. That is not a criticism, but it is a different population from a regulated futures venue, and different populations price the same question differently.
That is one of the real reasons a gap between venues can persist without being an error. Why venues disagree is the full list.
What this site does with it
It reads public market data, pairs markets against their nearest counterpart elsewhere, and reports the price difference with a grade describing how comparable the two questions are. It cannot trade, does not connect to a wallet, and never asks for credentials of any kind.
The number it produces is a theoretical cross-market edge: what the two prices imply before costs, timing and question mismatch are taken off. What a gap is actually worth is the subtraction.
Next
How resolution actually works is the most important page in this category.
Educational content only. Nothing here is financial advice, a solicitation, or an offer to trade. Prediction markets can move against you and a position can lose its entire value. Where this guide describes a difference between venues it describes a theoretical cross-market edge in observed prices, which is not a profit: fees, spreads, capital lockup, transfer time and differing settlement rules all come out of it first.
Keep reading
Polymarket · 3 min readHow Polymarket Resolves a MarketAn optimistic oracle proposes an answer, a window opens for challenges, and a dispute process exists behind it. What each stage means for a position you hold.
Polymarket · 3 min readWhen Resolution Is Disputed, and What It TeachesMost markets resolve quietly. The contested ones follow recognisable patterns, and those patterns tell you which questions to be careful with.
Polymarket · 3 min readStablecoin Collateral and What Self-Custody Means HerePositions are backed by a dollar-pegged stablecoin held in a contract. What that protects you from, what it does not, and the security rules that follow.
Cross-Market Gaps · 3 min readStale Quotes and Why Timing Ruins ComparisonsThe largest source of phantom cross-market opportunity is not disagreement. It is one price being older than the other. How to measure and exclude it.