What is Polymarket? A beginner's guide to prediction markets

Polymarket is a prediction market: people put real money on whether something will happen. Who wins an election, whether the Fed cuts rates this month, which team wins tonight, whether Bitcoin is up or down five minutes from now — each question is a market.

This guide explains three things with as little jargon as possible: what a price means, how you make or lose money, and how a market is settled.

#A share is worth at most $1

Every market has outcomes, most often Yes / No. You don't buy "odds" — you buy shares of an outcome:

• if the outcome happens, each share pays $1;
• if it doesn't, each share is worth $0.

So a share always costs between 0 and $1, usually written in cents. A Yes price of 62¢ means a share costs $0.62; you get $1 back if you're right and $0 if you're wrong.

#The price is the market's probability

Because a share is worth at most $1, the price reads directly as a probability:

No bookmaker sets this price. It is traded: people who think 62% is too low buy and push it up; people who think it's too high sell and push it down. The percentage you see on BOOPOLY or Polymarket is the market's real-money consensus right now.

Note

Yes and No add up to about $1. If Yes is 62¢, No is usually near 38¢; the small gap between them is the bid–ask spread.

#How you make or lose money

Say you buy 100 Yes shares at 40¢, for $40:

• It happens: 100 shares × $1 = $100, a $60 profit.
• It doesn't: you get $0 and lose the $40.
• You sell early: you don't have to wait for settlement. If news pushes the price to 70¢, you can sell the 100 shares for $70 and lock in $30.

The most you can lose is what you paid; you never owe more.

#Who decides: settlement

Every market has written rules: the source that decides the result, when it closes, what happens if an event is postponed or cancelled. When the market ends, Polymarket resolves it by those rules and the winning shares become $1.

• Sports games resolve on the official result;
• crypto Up/Down markets on Chainlink's price;
• elections and policy markets on the sources named in the rules.

Read the rules before you trade. Two markets with similar titles can resolve very differently — "at any time" and "by the deadline" are not the same question.

#Fees

• The spread: buying right away uses the ask, selling right away uses the bid; the gap between them is the spread.
• Fees: a market order, which fills right away, pays a taker fee; a limit order resting on the book pays none when it fills as a maker.

Rates are in Fees & Costs; prices, spreads and order types are explained in Prices and orders.

#BOOPOLY and Polymarket

BOOPOLY is an independent trading interface for Polymarket, not Polymarket itself. Orders you place on BOOPOLY go straight to Polymarket's order book as real Polymarket orders, and your funds sit in your own wallet. On top of an interface in English, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean, BOOPOLY offers:

• Automated trading: your own parameters, orders placed 24/7;
• Copy trading: follow a trader's orders by your rules;
• Sim and backtests: try your settings without real money.

To start, see Getting Started. Not ready for real money? Try Sim mode first.

Note

As with any trading, a position can lose value — at most the amount you paid for it. Real-money trading is not available in some countries and regions. This guide is general information, not investment advice.