Polymarket TWAP Settlement: What Actually Changed for Bots

Polymarket’s crypto up/down markets have settled against a Chainlink time-weighted average since 00:00 UTC on August 7. It did not stay as specified. One week in, the window on five-minute markets has already changed, from the 30 seconds Polymarket announced to 60 seconds, and that change has not been announced, documented or reported anywhere. The only place it appears is the rules text of the markets themselves.

The other thing worth knowing is what Polymarket did not change, and almost nobody has picked up on that either. Only the close became an average. The open is still a single price. The rules text on live markets compares the averaged window against the price at the beginning of the market’s time range, one instant, exactly the kind of number this whole change was meant to stop mattering so much.

This is the second update since the switch went live. Everything below is dated, and where something still is not knowable, this page says so instead of guessing.

What changed in the August 14 update

• Five-minute markets now settle on the 60-second Chainlink stream, not the 30-second one. Unannounced and, as far as we can find, unreported anywhere else.
• Hourly up/down markets are confirmed not to be TWAP markets. They settle on a Binance candle, with no Chainlink involved.
• Polymarket RTDS is live and is now the recommended production integration rather than a scheduled one.
• The documentation was rewritten. The testnet section is gone and feed identifiers are no longer published.

Polymarket TWAP settlement: what is confirmed

Question	Status as of August 14, 2026	Source
Did the switch happen on time?	Yes, live at 00:00 UTC on August 7, but the 5-minute window has moved since	Live market rules
What window do 5-minute markets use?	60 seconds, changed since the announcement	Live market rules
Does the window look back from the close?	Yes, trailing lookback	Live market rules, Polymarket docs
Is the open (the strike) also averaged?	No. Still a single price	Live market rules, re-verified August 14
Which markets are affected?	5-minute, 15-minute and 4-hour crypto, across eight assets	Live markets
Are hourly markets included?	No. They are not TWAP markets at all	Live market rules
Is Polymarket RTDS live?	Yes, and it is now the recommended integration	Polymarket docs
How does Chainlink compute the value?	Still unpublished	Polymarket docs

The Polymarket TWAP spec, and where it no longer matches the announcement

Market duration	TWAP window	Previously
All crypto 5-minute markets	60-second TWAP (changed since the announcement)	Single price at expiry
All crypto 15-minute markets	60-second TWAP	Single price at expiry
All crypto 4-hour markets	60-second TWAP	Single price at expiry

Effective August 7, 2026 at 00:00 UTC, with $1 million in liquidity rewards across impacted markets through August. Live markets confirm the change is running across BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, BNB, ZEC and HYPE at all three durations.

The 5-minute row is the one that moved, and it is the only one. Fifteen-minute and 4-hour markets were specified at 60 seconds from the start and are unchanged. What changed is that 5-minute markets joined them.

That row no longer matches Polymarket’s own announcement, which still says 30 seconds, and it does not match the documentation either, which still describes both windows without saying which one settles what. A live 5-minute market names its resolution source directly: the Chainlink BTC/USD TWAP data stream at the 60-second slug, listed twice in the rules and again in the Resolution Source field. Market rules outrank an announcement, so 60 seconds is the number to build on. It takes about thirty seconds to confirm for yourself: open any live 5-minute market and read the Resolution Source line.

If you read coverage from around July 12 describing this as a five-minute average applying only to 5-minute contracts, that was an earlier signal and it was wrong then. The July 30 announcement was the specification at launch, but on the five-minute window it no longer matches live markets, and current coverage still repeats the announced figure rather than the live one. Trust the rules text on the market you are about to trade.

Hourly markets are not TWAP markets at all

This was an open question on this page a week ago, and the answer turned out to be more interesting than “yes, they are included.”

Polymarket’s hourly up/down markets are a different product. No Chainlink, no oracle, no averaging. A live Bitcoin hourly market resolves to Up if the close price is greater than or equal to the open price for the BTC/USDT one hour candle that begins at the time in the title, and the resolution source is Binance, specifically the BTC/USDT pair, read once that candle is finalised. Other assets have hourly markets too; we have only read Bitcoin’s rules, so check the pair named in the market you trade.

So both ends of an hourly contract are still single prints, which is exactly the design the TWAP change was built to retire on the shorter durations. Nothing on this page applies to them: not the lookback window, not the manipulation reasoning, not the feed integration.

Practically, an hourly bot needs an entirely separate data path. You are watching a Binance candle, not a Chainlink stream, and your settlement reference is a spot pair on one exchange rather than an oracle. If you trade hourly and 5-minute markets from the same code, they need two different resolution models, and mixing them is how you end up wrong about which number decides your trades.

Polymarket TWAP window: it looks back from the close

This was our first open question, and it is settled. The averaging window is a trailing lookback: it covers the seconds immediately before the market’s close, not a period that starts at the close or straddles it.

Two independent things confirm it. Live markets bind their resolution to a named Chainlink stream whose identifier states the window length directly, and Polymarket’s own documentation has been consistent that the 30 and 60 second figures are lookback windows rather than publication rates.

Why it matters in practice: the settlement value stops being a future unknown once the window opens. For a 5-minute market, that is now the final 60 seconds, a fifth of the contract’s entire life rather than a tenth. Settlement starts locking in around the four-minute mark.

Everything printed inside the window is already weighted into the answer, so the outcome becomes progressively fixed as the window elapses. There is no late instant that overturns it, which is exactly the property the old design lacked.

The half that did not change: the price to beat is still a snapshot

Here is the finding that should reshape how you think about this change.

The live rules resolve a market to Up if the Chainlink time-weighted average over the market’s stated range is at or above “the price at the beginning of that range.” Not the average at the beginning of that range. The price. A single number at a single instant, unchanged from the old design.

So the contract is asymmetric. One end is an average that costs real money to move and has to be held against everyone fading you. The other end is a single print, the same object the academic work identified as the exploitable part of the old design.

Two honest qualifications, because this deserves reasoning rather than alarm.

First, the incentive at the open is far weaker than it was at the close, and the reason is positioning. Pushing a close is surgical: you already hold the position, you know precisely which side you need, and the payoff is immediate and certain. Pushing an open is speculative: you are setting a strike before the book has built around it, and you still have to be right about the entire market that follows. Same mechanism, much worse risk-adjusted payoff.

Second, and this is the part worth watching, the strike sits at the start of a range that, for back-to-back short markets, lands on the same clock boundary where the previous market’s averaged window ends. Whether that adjacency creates anything usable is untested and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But it is the obvious place to look, and if you are building a model of where residual edge lives, look there before you look anywhere else.

Compare this to how Kalshi handles the same problem. Its crypto contracts settle on a sixty-second average of a regulated benchmark index, and they average at both ends of the contract. Polymarket has averaged one end. Whether that is a deliberate judgement that the open is not worth the complexity, or simply the next thing on the list, only Polymarket knows. If the open becomes a TWAP in a future update, you will know the last snapshot in the contract has closed.

Why Polymarket did this

Because the single-print design was measurably exploitable, and someone measured it carefully.

A working paper dated June 30, 2026 by David Dai and Ruizhe Jia of Stanford and Shihao Yu of Singapore Management University, “Settlement Manipulation in Prediction Markets”, studied roughly sixteen thousand 5-minute Bitcoin contracts from the February 12, 2026 launch. Its coverage reports 821 wallets, about one in three hundred of the people who traded the contract, capturing around $8.2 million in the cycles they pushed while breaking even everywhere else, with 93 percent of the losses falling on retail. The tell was net spot order flow in the final ten seconds jumping far above its pre-launch level and then reverting, which is the signature of temporary price pressure rather than information. The same signature was much weaker in 15-minute contracts.

The authors’ recommendation was to lengthen the contract horizon. Polymarket did not do that. It kept the 5-minute product, which is its most popular, and changed the shape of the number that product settles against instead.

Whether a 30-second window was sufficient deterrence was an open question a week ago. Polymarket appears to have answered it themselves, quietly, by doubling the window on the one duration that was being exploited.

Polymarket TWAP strategy impact, by strategy type

The mechanism is simple enough to reason about directly. Moving a snapshot means dislocating the price for one instant. Moving a 60-second average means holding that dislocation for a full minute while every arbitrageur on the other side fades you. That is not a slightly higher cost, it is a different class of problem, and it scales with the window.

What follows is reasoning from the mechanism plus what is now confirmed about the rules. It is not measured post-change data, because none has been published.

Settlement snipers and final-seconds pushes. This is what the change was built to end, and at the close it has ended. The strategy that extracted eight figures from 5-minute Bitcoin does not survive an averaged close, and it survives a doubled window even less. The residual question is whether anything migrates to the open, which is the section above.

Latency arbitrage against stale quotes. Alive. If your edge was reading the underlying and hitting a Polymarket quote that had not repriced, the settlement mechanism was never what you were exploiting. What changes is the other side of the trade: makers now carry less risk of a settlement flipping on a single print, so they can quote tighter and reprice with more confidence. Expect the stale-quote windows you were harvesting to narrow rather than vanish.

Market makers. The clear winners. Less settlement-flip risk, plus a million dollars in liquidity rewards through August aimed squarely at this seat. Inventory risk during a real market move is unchanged, because a TWAP still moves when the market really moves.

Copy trading. Worse, and worth saying plainly. The wallets that looked most worth copying in 5-minute crypto were disproportionately running the strategy that stopped working on August 7. Any track record built before that date is a record of a different game, and anything from the week since was built on a 30-second window that no longer applies either.

The strategy that replaces sniping. Once the window opens, the settlement value becomes a partially determined running average. That converts a speed problem into a forecasting problem: estimating where the average lands given what has already printed, and quoting against that estimate. Speed still matters, but it is speed applied to tracking and requoting rather than to landing one order at one instant. A 60-second window on a 5-minute contract makes that estimate easier to form and available earlier.

Polymarket rewards, fees and rate limits

Three things that change the arithmetic of the maker pivot above.

The liquidity rewards are a top-up to an existing programme, not a new one. Polymarket scores resting limit orders on a curve that rewards tightness to the midpoint and boosts two-sided quoting, normalises your score against every other maker, and pays out daily. The allocation is published by duration and by asset rather than as a single pool, and each incentivised market publishes its own configured daily reward rate, maximum qualifying spread and minimum qualifying order size, readable per market. Query the real number for the market you intend to quote rather than working from a monthly average. Note also that rewards are tallied per day against a $1 minimum, and days below it are not paid and do not roll over, so spreading thin across many markets can score all day and pay nothing.

Fees still favour makers heavily. The crypto taker fee is charged on a curve that peaks at the 50 cent midpoint, which is exactly where these markets trade, while makers pay nothing and receive a rebate funded from collected taker fees. That asymmetry existed before the switch and is unchanged by it, but it compounds with it: the taker-side edge got worse and the maker-side incentive did not.

Per-signer rate limits are close to enforcement. Polymarket has been running token-bucket limits per signer, separate from the existing address-level limits, in a warning period that has now expired, with tiers scaling by thirty-day maker volume. No enforcement start date has been announced. Watch the rate-limit headers on your responses, and note that a batch is all-or-nothing against your bucket, so a batch larger than your burst capacity can never be admitted and must be split. If you are retooling your quoting loop anyway, size it against your tier now rather than discovering the ceiling later.

What is still unknown about the Polymarket TWAP

Short list, because the honest ones matter more than the confident ones.

When the five-minute window changed, and whether Polymarket will document it. The switch is visible in live markets but appears in no announcement, changelog or documentation page, so there is no way to date it from the outside. It is also possible that other parameters have moved just as quietly, which is an argument for reading the rules text of the market you trade rather than trusting any published spec, this page included.

How Chainlink computes the value. Still unpublished. The sampling boundaries, weighting, rounding and missing-input behaviour are not documented, and Polymarket’s docs explicitly tell developers not to reproduce the value independently. The settlement number is an authoritative black box: you verify the signature and the freshness, you do not recompute it.

Whether any of this worked. Nobody has published numbers a week in. Volume effects, spread effects, whether market makers actually tightened, and whether the final-seconds spot anomaly has diminished are all real questions with no public data behind them. We will update this page with figures when there are figures.

Integrating the Polymarket TWAP feeds

Two routes. Chainlink Data Streams gives you the signed reports directly, with the SDK handling authentication and reconnection. Polymarket’s Real-Time Data Streaming WebSocket relays the same Chainlink-computed values without credentials, using the 30-second and 60-second TWAP topics, filtered with an exact compact JSON symbol form, and kept alive with a PING text frame every five seconds.

The integration path changed after go-live. The documentation no longer publishes feed identifiers: you now find an asset’s TWAP ticker in the Chainlink Data Streams catalog and copy the ID from its product page. The SDKs have moved off betas to stable releases. RTDS is live and is now the recommended production integration, so the pre-launch caveats that used to apply, about subscriptions being rejected before the topic existed, no longer do. Pull current identifiers and versions from Polymarket’s Chainlink TWAP documentation rather than from any blog, including this one.

The operational details that actually bite:

• The 30 and 60 second figures are lookback windows, not publication rates. Do not infer the window from update frequency and do not use update frequency as a health check. Use the observation timestamp for freshness.
• There is no snapshot, no history and no replay. Subscriptions start at the next update, so a disconnect at the wrong moment leaves a hole the stream cannot fill. Your reconnect path needs Data Streams as the authoritative source.
• Decoding is not verifying. The decode step parses the report, it does not verify the signatures. For anything settlement-sensitive, follow Chainlink’s verification requirements.
• Your clock is a dependency again. The SDK signs each request and expects your server clock within five seconds of Chainlink’s. A drifting box fails in ways that look random rather than in ways that look like a clock problem.
• Preserve the exact value. The feed carries a full-accuracy fixed-point number alongside a display value. Keep the exact one as an integer or decimal string. Rounding a settlement price through a floating point type is how you build a bot that is right about the market and wrong about the outcome.

The 30-second topic may now settle nothing

Polymarket still documents two windows, and RTDS still exposes both a 30-second and a 60-second topic. But if 5-minute markets have moved to the 60-second stream, and 15-minute and 4-hour markets were always on it, then no live crypto up/down market resolves against the 30-second feed.

That makes it the most dangerous subscription in the stack. The 30-second topic is live, it returns real and correct numbers on schedule, and every health check you have will pass. It simply is not the number your markets settle on. Nothing errors, nothing disconnects, and your settlement logic drifts from reality without a single warning.

Check which topic your bot subscribes to before you check anything else, then match it against the Resolution Source printed on the market page for each duration you trade. The market page is the authority, not the documentation.

What to do with your Polymarket bot now

1. Confirm you are reading the right TWAP window, not just a TWAP. Open a live market in each duration you trade, read the Resolution Source, and match it to the topic your bot subscribes to. If any part of your stack still infers resolution from a last-traded price or a single tick, it is wrong on every 5-minute, 15-minute and 4-hour crypto market.
2. Separate your hourly logic from your TWAP logic. Hourly markets settle on a Binance candle and share no data path with the rest. If one codebase trades both, it needs two resolution models.
3. Verify your feed path end to end. Confirm your topics return live events, confirm your decoder matches the current report schema and price scale, and confirm signature verification is actually running rather than merely present in the code.
4. Log both numbers for a week. Record the close print and the settlement TWAP for every market you touch. That dataset tells you how far apart they run in practice, which is the input to every edge estimate you make next.
5. Size down until you have post-change data. Your fill assumptions, edge estimates and risk model were fitted to a settlement mechanism that no longer exists, and the mechanism has already changed twice.
6. Model the open explicitly. It is the remaining single print in the contract. Whether or not you intend to trade around it, your risk model should know it is there.
7. Re-derive rather than adjust. The temptation is to assume the old model still holds with a correction factor. It might not, and the cheapest way to find out is a small size and a clean log.

What infrastructure changes here, and what it does not

Our honest read, as the company that sells the servers.

The pitch that speed wins you a race to a single settlement print is finished, and anyone still selling it has not read the rules text. What survives is less glamorous and more durable: a stable low-latency path for quoting and cancelling, a machine that stays up through a window you cannot pause, clock discipline for a feed that now checks your clock, and enough headroom to run a verification path alongside your trading path without either one starving.

What infrastructure does not fix is the strategy. If your edge was the snapshot, no server restores it. Rebuild first, then measure the path. The method for measuring it properly has not changed, our latency checker still gives you a zero-install first look, and our position on providers quoting fixed millisecond numbers from a sales page has not changed either.

For where the order engine actually sits and what drives these markets, see our Polymarket crypto trading infrastructure guide. If your client predates the April exchange upgrade, fix that first with the V2 migration guide, because a bot that cannot place an order has no opinion about settlement. Both our Polymarket locations come with a free 3-day demo if you want to measure the path yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions

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The 60-second window on 5-minute markets, the trailing lookback, the treatment of the open price, and the hourly market mechanics on this page were read from live market rules text on August 14, 2026. Integration details come from Polymarket’s Chainlink TWAP documentation. Research figures come from the Dai, Jia and Yu working paper of June 30, 2026. Polymarket has changed at least one published parameter without announcing it, so the rules text of the market you are trading is always the current authority, including over this page. This is infrastructure and educational content, not trading or financial advice.