Ohan retweeted
I don’t understand any of this anymore 🙄
I know, I know, it was supposed to be only positive about Polymarket, but I couldn’t help myself 😆😆😆
LeBron is welcoming people to HQ like everything is great, and right next to it people are complaining about outages, frozen trading and a platform that keeps falling apart
They clearly have millions for LeBron… and yet the site still looks like it’s held together with hope
I genuinely don’t get it 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹
#Polymarket #LeBron #PredictionMarket
Have been seeing a bunch of posts today about Polymarket increasing its crypto taker latency. I don't think any of the people who are complaining are the ones who have any shot of benefitting from the increase.
Fundamentally, on Polymarket right now, your cancels can latency spike to 250+ms. This means that makers are at a DISADVANTAGE compared to takers. At least a 150ms taker delay levels the playing field a bit.
"But Kalshi has no taker delay?"
Sure. But Kalshi also has a functioning CLOB. Kalshi does not have 250ms+ cancel latency spikes. On Kalshi, there is a clear and well-documented path towards getting FIX and VPC.
Polymarket is behind. If and when Polymarket catches up in infra and releases their Rust rewrite and gets their P99 cancel down to 10ms and makes a VPC connection available to all serious participants, then perhaps a shorter taker hurdle makes sense.
Anyways, I wrote some stuff about this a long while ago, but I think it still holds up.
I assume that most of the people who are complaining are not the target audience of this sort of writing, but at least wanted to put this out there.
Refreshing to see you admitting the state of your exchange.
But given that you know how bad cancel latency spikes, why is your taker delay still 50ms?
How can you justify letting even low latency makers on fiber/microwave who send their cancels as fast as possible be picked off by HFT takes on 250ms cancel spikes?
Why would you expect anyone to provide tight liquidity when even the best possible infra can be picked?
Honest post: the Polymarket DeFi CLOB is full of tech debt. It grew fast, got hacked together, and most of the team inherited it that way. Since joining and building out the team, we have scaled it 10x and made it 3x faster, but it’s not enough; the core foundations of how it’s been built are wrong in almost every way. You try to fix one thing, and another thing goes wrong; the conclusion now is that the codebase can’t be saved long-term.
The exchange is the heart of Polymarket; everything runs through it. If we want to be the best exchange in the world, it must be fast, stable, and scalable. We can’t keep patching the old one, where these core foundations are generally missing throughout, so we’re rewriting it from scratch in Rust.
Early numbers: 10-20x faster on p99 than today, 200,000 orders per second (15x what we have now, with room to reach 400,000+), and stability under load. This will put us faster than most exchanges, including CEXs.
Building it in Rust gives us memory safety with no garbage collector. No GC means no random pauses and no random latency spikes; the tail latency in the benchmarks is the tail latency you get in production, alongside a strict compiler that enforces correctness up front. Data races and memory corruption (the bugs that take exchanges down) can’t exist in the first place.
Polymarket has to take it seriously that we are an exchange; this is people’s money, not a joke. To succeed, we have to fix this; otherwise, we will fail. It’s as simple as that. I joined to build the best software in the world, not to maintain some of the worst, and I will do everything I can to make Polymarket a serious exchange.
We are aiming to have the exchange ready sometime in Q4 (mid to end). I'll communicate progress as we go so you all know the status. Breaking changes will be minimal for all integrators and will be communicated in advance. We will maintain the existing CLOB and keep trying to improve it as we build this side by side. We can’t wait to throw away the existing CLOB; we dislike it as much as you all do.
Make Polymarket fast, finally.
bonereaper is an HFT taker on Polymarket’s crypto up/down markets who received a special unadvertised 80% taker rebate.
This was not documented anywhere on Polymarket, and was only discovered after users discovered bonereaper's account's rebates were larger than expected.
After which, Polymarket devs have declared this as an "experiment at reducing fees".
several thoughts below.
(h/t to the folks from Gravia who uncovered this). (1/n)
we’ve been testing custom rebates with some active takers as a way to generally lower fees and see if it helps volume.
it’s an experiment, not a hidden deal, and it’s not limited to one account or funder. if you’re an active taker you most probably already got an email from me about it
-- as mentioned the same on discord to you all
My guess as to what happened here: Polymarket saw that they were rapidly losing market share in crypto prediction markets, they noticed, “Well, hey, HFT is still using our product; maybe we should go ask them how to increase volume.”
And, of course, the larger HFT pushed for the things that benefit HFT: lower taker delays, special fee deals, private VPC/colo agreements. And Polymarket agreed, because from their perspective, keeping top traders happy would increase their volume and grow the exchange.
But HFT takers can never drive sustainable growth of a market. The only thing that drives growth is retail.
lots of us have been complaining about poly for months.
people don't want to quote on a platform with:
* rampant manipulation
* ghost fills
* a new microstructure exploit every week
* 5 second cancel latency spikes
* a dev team which refuses to acknowledge real problems
some of these problems have been addressed, but basic functionality has taken months to land.
nowadays, top of book typically has ~500 contracts on poly and ~5000 on kalshi.
no makers -> retail moves on
it's a shame. i want polymarket to succeed. users benefit the most when there is real competition. but right now, there is only one real option.
ngl this is starting to seem ridiculous for polymarket
how can you let your direct competitor go from <10% crypto volume market share to over 92% in just 8 months
it’s obvious that kalshi has done a great job, but poly seems to be literally out of the game
what’s happening @shayne_coplan?
Ohan retweeted
Netflix had a chance to make a genuinely interesting documentary about prediction markets.
Instead, they made a sensationalized film built on fiction.
The preview they released features a Kalshi trade slip that's completely fabricated - it looks nothing like our UI. It's either photoshopped or AI-generated.
The people in the trailer aren't even Kalshi traders, they're a group of influencers. Is anything in this documentary real?
We flagged the fake trade slip to @netflix. They said they'd pull the trailer. They haven't.
Expected better from Netflix.
NEW: A clash of cultural titans... Kalshi is threatening legal action against Netflix, claiming this trailer contains "defamatory" and "fabricated" content, per letter obtained by CNN. Netflix disputes this. (BTW, Kalshi's CEO is in the doc!) story --> cnn.com/2026/07/24/politics/…
Ohan retweeted
Binance is arguably the world's largest crypto exchange.
Feb 2026: Polymarket lists a small 5-minute Bitcoin contract. Since then, Binance order flow spikes in the final seconds before settlement; prices revert soon after.
New paper with David Dai and Shihao Yu ( @ShihaoY ): Settlement Manipulation in Prediction Markets (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…)🧵
The finding, up front:
Traders push Bitcoin's price in the final seconds to decide the contract. That push makes the price less informative, yet Bitcoin's market more liquid. Market makers are largely insulated; ordinary traders lose $7.6M in two months.
Ohan retweeted
Open letter to @Polymarket and especially @shayne_coplan:
I've been trading on Polymarket for a long time. I am one of the biggest traders on the entire platform and I interact with it on a daily basis.
And at this point I'm seriously questioning whether the team has simply given up.
I'm not even trying to be dramatic. Wtf is actually going on?
Has everyone made enough money that nobody cares anymore? Is the team completely overwhelmed? Are priorities completely broken? Is there no leadership? Is it incompetence?
Because the current state of the platform is honestly embarrassing.
Every maintenance seems to follow the exact same script:
announce 10 minutes of downtime
start 20 minutes late
stay down for an hour
deploy changes that break multiple existing systems
leave the bugs in production for weeks
And somehow nobody seems concerned.
Example:
~1.5 weeks ago an update broke tick sizes. The matching engine started rejecting orders that matched the correct tick size after a tick size change was published.
This was immediately visible after deployment.
It's still broken.
Nobody seems to care.
Then for the last two days Polymarket's own RTDS feed, the feed used for all crypto markets, has been broken.
The issue was marked "resolved" 10 hours ago.
It still isn't resolved!
Did anyone spend literally 5 seconds checking whether data was actually being published before closing the incident?
Because it sure doesn't feel like it.
Communication is somehow even worse than the bugs.
Half the changes never get announced.
The other half are hidden in random Discord side conversations.
Major trading-impacting changes get silently rolled out with zero documentation.
You ask support.
They say they'll ask the team.
Then you never hear back.
Or you get the same canned response you've already received three times.
The team keeps saying communication will improve.
It never does.
Then there's the rebate and fee situation.
Taker tiers were supposed to launch on May 28.
A week later they still weren't live.
Nobody acknowledged the delay.
The docs still said May 28.
To this day there still hasn't been a single taker rebate payment.
And the official position is apparently that missed rebates won't be back-paid.
How is that acceptable?
How are traders supposed to adjust strategies, thresholds, and risk when nobody knows what fees they are actually paying, what rebates they are actually earning, or how much of the promised rewards the platform simply decides not to distribute?
That isn't transparency and it is clearly destroying trust.
The craziest part is that every update creates fresh opportunities for exploiters.
Just in the last couple weeks we've had:
queue position jump exploits
taker delay bypass exploits
ghost fill exploits
various matching and infrastructure bugs
order spam exploits
Millions of dollars have been extracted from legitimate users through platform failures.
The response?
Increase rate limits.
Seriously.
A huge amount of latency issues today are caused by order spam that is directly incentivized by broken infrastructure and exploitable mechanics.
Fixing the root causes would help.
Instead we get band-aids.
Which raises another question:
Does Polymarket have a testing environment?
Does it have staging?
Can updates be rolled back?
Because from the outside it honestly looks like production is the testing environment.
Every maintenance introduces new failures.
Every maintenance gets partially reverted.
Every maintenance creates more issues than it solves.
This shouldn't be happening at a company valued in the billions.
Meanwhile manipulation that has been repeatedly reported for months continues largely unchecked while manipulators keep extracting money from normal users.
And surprise:
Volume is declining.
Prediction markets as a whole are growing.
Yet Polymarket just posted its second consecutive month of declining volume.
Meanwhile Kalshi has become the clear market leader in many categories and is now outperforming Polymarket by large multiples in areas where Polymarket used to dominate.
Honestly?
It's not hard to see why.
Every serious trader I've spoken to says the same thing:
Kalshi feels stable.
Polymarket feels like you're one deployment away from disaster.
I know multiple people who would happily trade Polymarket full-time if they trusted the platform.
They don't.
Not because of competition.
Because they don't trust Polymarket itself.
My trust in this platform is at an all-time low.
And I genuinely don't understand what is happening internally.
Maybe the response will be that the team is busy with the World Cup or other initiatives.
Fine.
Then stop shipping half-finished features.
Stop deploying untested fixes.
Stop breaking live trading.
Slow down.
Focus on fewer things.
Do them properly.
The most concerning part is that so many decisions feel like they were made by people with no actual trading experience.
The product decisions show it.
The infrastructure decisions show it.
The market structure decisions show it.
Building the future of prediction markets requires understanding how markets actually function.
Right now it often feels like nobody is steering the ship.
I want Polymarket to succeed.
But from the perspective of someone who uses the platform every day, this is bordering on unusable.
@Polymarket
@shayne_coplan
What is going on?
At some point, I decided to stop constantly adjusting one of my Polymarket crypto up/down strategies (the one running out of account "ohanism") to deal with market manipulation by toxic participants.
This is the outcome.
It is still profitable, but you can see that after May 13 it has been much lower Sharpe, much larger, more frequent drawdowns. The main reason is that new classes of manipulators emerged, and I am bleeding large amounts of PnL to their impact.
There will be a point when it stops making money entirely, and at that point I will likely turn off rather than constantly adapting.
Some thoughts.
1. If you think you have an algo capable of winning in a game with all manipulations, you are lying to yourself. You have an algo capable of dealing with *today's* manipulators. Tomorrow's will be more sophisticated.
2. People can and do make money trading around manipulation. But it's an ever-evolving game that you are playing at a massive disadvantage.
3. I feel confident that I can go back in the code, make significant changes to the way I trade around manipulation, and go back to making a profit. But to what end? Will I need to spend half my week constantly chasing what manipulators are doing next? When will I find time to work on anything else?
I would much rather spend my time providing in games where I am not at a structural disadvantage.
4. TWAP will not perfectly solve the problem, but it will help considerably. At the very least, it makes things much more annoying for today's manipulators.
Ohan retweeted
I’ve been one of the biggest market makers on Polymarket for a long time. At peak I was doing $10M+ daily volume and paying thousands in fees every single day.
The current state is the worst the platform has ever felt.
Ghost fills still everywhere. Markets constantly breaking. Payouts randomly missing. Exploits going on for months while the team says “it’s fixed”. You spend more time defending against bugs than actually trading.
Meanwhile, communication is a joke.
They say “we’re listening” → ignore emails, ignore DMs.
They say “we’ll work with top users” → instead it’s random private Telegram groups with whoever shouts the loudest.
They say “issue fixed” → it clearly isn’t.
At some point you stop believing anything they say.
The fee situation is another one. If you’re generating serious volume and paying serious fees (thousands a day), most exchanges shower you with attention and perks. I'm not asking for that but would be nice to at least be acknowledged that you exist and have basic communication, especially after they've announced publicly multiple times that they will start doing this.
Instead we got a week-long hype campaign for a “big update” that turned out to be… a hidden fee increase.
How dumb do you think your users are?
And then stuff like April 5th, missed referral/rebate payments, no announcement, no explanation, nothing. Just silence. That’s not a bug, that’s trust damage.
The bigger issue is it feels like nobody on the team has actual trading experience. The design decisions show it. Every update introduces new edge cases, new exploits, new ways to break the order book.
People have made many millions exploiting this stuff. Many of these accounts are obvious, trackable, preventable. The community has been pointing it out for months.
Ignored.
Only now that the markets are borderline unusable does it seem like there’s urgency. Right now the platform is honestly close to untradeable:
– ghost fills
– manipulation
– unreliable payouts
– constant bugs
– zero transparency
And surprise, volume is dropping.
Meanwhile Kalshi is catching up fast (have basically overtaken in volume in almost every category except for politics) and Hyperliquid is entering with a team that actually understands trading systems.
I want Polymarket to succeed.
And yes, maybe the upcoming ghost fill fix helps. But if this pattern continues, terrible communication, fake timelines, ignoring core users, then this won’t be a place serious traders stick around.
You can’t build a market while eroding the trust of the people who provide the liquidity, especially not as a many multi billion dollar company! I have spoken to many large polymarket whales (of which a considerable amount have already given up on the platform) and they all share this sentiment.
@Polymarket @mustafap0ly @SuhailKakar @_kanarazu_