Polymarket changed its trading rules to add taker fees to its 15-minute crypto prediction markets. The change goes against the platform’s long-standing policy of not charging fees for trades, but it only applies to these short-term markets. The protocol doesn’t keep the fees that takers pay. Instead, they are given back to market makers in USDC stablecoin as liquidity rebates.
The new fee model showed up on Polymarket’s site without a formal public announcement. Checks of archived documents show that the language about the taker fee is new.
The new fee structure means that prices change based on the odds in the market. Fees are usually highest when market prices are close to even odds, and they go down to almost nothing when prices get close to extreme odds, like 0% or 100%. An example in the documentation says that a taker trade with 100 shares priced at $0.50 could cost a fee of just over 3% of the trade value at that level of probability.
The change in fees only affects crypto price prediction markets that last 15 minutes. Under the current model, longer-term event markets like political outcomes or non-crypto predictions don’t have to pay fees.
Polymarket’s 15-minute crypto markets let people bet on short-term price changes related to major cryptocurrencies. Chainlink oracles, which provide decentralized real-time price data for quick settlement, helped build these markets. They run on the Polygon network.
The goal of taker fees is to help these quick-resolution markets stay liquid by sending money to liquidity providers. Incentives are meant to get makers to make bids and ask prices closer together and keep the market more stable.
The fee implementation doesn’t change most of Polymarket’s other services, which still let users trade without paying any fees.
Polymarket is still one of the biggest blockchain-based prediction market platforms where people can buy and sell shares linked to different outcomes. In the past few months, the platform has grown in both the number of predictions and the number of features, such as the addition of ultra-short timeframe markets.
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/polymarket-quietly-adds-taker-fees-15-minute-crypto-markets
