Polymarket’s new network goes live

Polymarket announced the launch of its new network and native stablecoin. To boost trading, the prediction platform will offer $1M in additional liquidity. 

Polymarket completed its network upgrade on Tuesday and resumed trading about an hour after the update. As Cryptopolitan reported earlier, Polymarket will upgrade and transform its platform from a prediction market to a professional trading venue, including market makers and upcoming perpetual futures trading. 

Registered users with balances on the platform can log on and convert their stablecoins from bridged USDC to the new pUSD asset, announced Polymarket through its X handle. 

The shift to a new trading and settlement system follows a period of rapid growth for Polymarket, which has outgrown its current bet and settlement system. 

Trading will now occur on Polymarket’s CLOB (Central Limit Order Book), a hybrid system that combines decentralized settlement with off-chain order matching. All trades will still be decentralized and non-custodial. 

The final transactions will still settle on Polygon. Polymarket also abandoned the bridged USDC stablecoin and moved to its own asset, pUSD. The token is still backed by USDC, and for front-end users, balances will be automatically converted. 

For power users, Polymarket launched an API that wraps USDC into pUSD for API-based trading.

What is new in Polymarket’s order matching and settlement system? 

Polymarket has rebuilt its exchange entirely, using a new version of Solidity, 0.8.30, according to the platform’s documentation.

Polymarket has rebuilt its order manager, ledger, executor, balance checker, and tracker as all-new services. Orders will not be tracked by on-chain nonces, but by a time stamp accurate to the millisecond.  

The predictions platform will also overhaul its team and add observability to monitor errors or unusual events, stated the VP of engineering, DeFi Josh Stevens, in a recent X post. 

Users reacted to the new trading system with a note on unexpected fees. Before the upgrade, Polymarket announced that markets for geopolitical and world events will remain free. However, other eligible markets will introduce fees at the time of order matching. 

Traders noticed the fees were unexpectedly levied on a per-market basis. Polymarket will use the fees to fund its Market Rebates Program, which compensates market makers. Market takers will supply the fees. The recent addition of rebates has also opened Polymarket to bot-driven market-making activity. 

So far, Polymarket has not discouraged trading bots and has turned into a venue for testing AI agents with autonomous wallets. 

Polymarket launches upgrade as volumes remain near peak levels

The Polymarket upgrade arrived after one of its most successful months to date. In April, the platform reached $8.1B in trading volumes, after the March peak of $10.6B. 

In April, however, Polymarket achieved peak fees of over $28M, based on Dune Analytics data.

The platform has reached 2.49M unique users and achieved a cumulative volume of $81B to date. Kalshi still competes with the platform, and is so far the leader in taker volumes, with over $13B monthly, compared to Polymarket’s $8B. 

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