🌐 What is Polymarket? Prediction markets explained

Polymarket is a prediction market: a place where people trade on the outcomes of real-world events. Will a candidate win an election? Will Bitcoin end the month above a price? Each question becomes a market, each possible outcome becomes a share you can buy or sell, and the trading price of that share is a live, crowd-generated estimate of how likely the outcome is.

How a prediction market works

A market like "Will X happen by December 31?" has two outcome shares: YES and NO. Traders buy and sell them in an order book, the same way stocks or currencies trade — prices come from what participants are willing to pay each other, not from a bookmaker's odds sheet.

When the event resolves:

• Shares of the outcome that occurred are redeemed for $1.00 each.
• Shares of the outcome that did not occur become worth $0.

So if you buy a YES share at 40¢ and the event happens, that share redeems at $1.00. If it does not happen, the share expires worthless. Everything in between — buying, selling, changing your mind — happens at market prices.

Prices are probabilities

Because a share pays exactly $1 if its outcome occurs, its price is a direct readout of the market's collective probability estimate. A YES share at 7¢ means the market currently prices about a 7% chance; at 93¢, about 93%. Prices move continuously as news arrives and traders update their positions — which is why prediction market charts are often watched as forecasts in their own right.

Two practical consequences:

• "Cheap" is not "good value" by itself. A 5¢ share is priced low because the market considers the outcome unlikely, not because it is a bargain.
• You don't have to hold to resolution. If you buy at 30¢ and the price moves to 60¢, you can sell and realize the difference without waiting for the event — or watch the market resolve against you and lose the stake. Positions can lose part or all of their value.

The payoff math — and what a price does not promise — is covered in How to read Polymarket odds.

What trades on Polymarket

Markets cover politics, sports, crypto prices, economics, entertainment and more — including short recurring markets such as hourly crypto UP/DOWN rounds. Each market states its resolution rules up front: what counts as YES, what source decides it, and when — How Polymarket markets resolve explains the process.

Trades settle on-chain (on Polygon), so positions and trading history are public — anyone can verify what a wallet did on a block explorer. That public history is what makes tools like copy trading possible. It is also the biggest structural difference from Kalshi, the other large prediction market — Polymarket vs Kalshi compares the two.

Where Polyfox fits

Polyfox is an independent Telegram trading terminal built for Polymarket — it is not affiliated with or operated by Polymarket. It lets you browse and trade these markets from Telegram chat, from an on-chain wallet whose keys you can export at any time, and adds tools on top: copy trading, limit orders and Smart Wallets rankings built from historical on-chain data.

This page is informational only and is not investment advice. Prediction market positions are volatile and can lose all of their value — see Legal notes.

Next steps

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