Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Asher (@Asher_ 0210)
Last weekend, Josh Stevens, DeFi Engineering Vice President of Polymarket, published a lengthy post directly addressing the most pressing issue currently facing this prediction market leader: the trading experience on Polymarket has noticeably deteriorated recently.
For average users, this feeling is more direct: prices are displayed on the page, but clicking yields no response; orders are submitted but results are迟迟不来; sometimes after refreshing multiple times, they find the transaction never went through. What should be a light operation has become laggy, hesitant, and even makes users unsure if their purchase was successful.
Stevens also admitted in his post that Polymarket's growth has far exceeded the capacity of its existing infrastructure, and the team had not prepared adequately for scaling. Subsequently, he outlined a comprehensive engineering improvement plan, including reducing on-chain data latency, fixing order cancellation issues, rebuilding the CLOB, improving website performance, launching a unified SDK and API, and advancing Perps.
But what quickly captured the market's focus was one relatively short yet重磅 statement: Polymarket is advancing "chain migration." In other words, Polymarket is planning to change its blockchain.
Changing chains isn't simply moving an application from one chain to another or building a new public chain; it signifies that Polymarket is重新选择 its underlying trading environment. When a prediction market starts operating like an exchange, the underlying public chain is no longer just the background; it becomes the ceiling.
When Polygon Shifts from a Cost-Effective Option to a Growth Cap
Polymarket running on Polygon in its early days was not a wrong choice. For a prediction market still validating demand, Polygon was cheap, lightweight, and allowed users to complete transactions and settlements at low cost.
But today's Polymarket is no longer a low-frequency betting product. Users aren't just occasionally buying an event outcome; they are trading expectations in constantly changing probability prices. Prices need updating, orders need matching, positions need adjusting, settlements need keeping up. The closer the product resembles a trading platform, the harder it is to hide the problems of the underlying chain.
This is the root cause of the recent poor experience. Price delays, order cancellations, slow transaction confirmations might have been minor, occasional issues in the early stages; but when Polymarket carries higher-frequency trading behavior, these problems directly become growth bottlenecks. What trading platforms fear most isn't a lack of features, but users starting to doubt whether they can execute trades smoothly.
Therefore, the more block space, lower Gas fees, and shorter block times mentioned by Stevens aren't just technical parameters; they are the survival conditions for Polymarket's next phase. It no longer needs a chain that is "good enough," but rather a set of underlying infrastructure capable of handling trading scale.
In other words, the real reason Polymarket is considering a chain change isn't that Polygon suddenly became unusable, but that Polymarket has evolved from a prediction market application into a system closer to an exchange. Polygon has thus shifted from a cost-effective option to a growth cap.
More Than Just a Chain Change: What Polymarket Really Needs to Redo is the Trading System
If one only looks at the term "chain migration," it's easy to interpret this update as a simple chain迁移. But judging from the roadmap announced by Stevens, what Polymarket is changing is not just the underlying blockchain, but the entire trading system.
The most critical item is the rebuilding of the CLOB. The CLOB can be simply understood as the core order book system of a trading platform, responsible for accepting orders, matching trades, and forming market depth. Stevens特别强调 that CLOB V2 is not a complete rewrite and won't单独解决 performance and stability issues; what's truly important is that Polymarket is rebuilding the CLOB from scratch.
This also indicates that Polymarket clearly understands that changing chains can only improve the settlement environment; it cannot replace the upgrade of the trading system itself. If the order book, matching engine, interfaces, and risk control capabilities don't keep up, even if the underlying chain becomes faster, the user experience won't truly improve.
Hence, the other actions in this roadmap become understandable. Reducing on-chain data latency, fixing transaction cancellations, improving website performance, launching a unified SDK and a single WebSocket API are essentially not scattered patches but are补全 the fundamental capabilities a trading platform must possess.
More importantly, Perps are on the way. Stevens mentioned that Polymarket's perpetual contracts will use全新 contracts, and the backend will also be built from scratch in Rust. For Polymarket, this means what it will carry next might not just be event trading, but higher-frequency, more complex financial products closer to those on exchanges.
Therefore, the chain change is only the most visible step in this reconstruction. The real change is that Polymarket is moving from a prediction market application towards a set of trading infrastructure. What it needs to solve next isn't just "which chain to run on," but "whether it can operate as stably as an exchange."
Polymarket Hasn't Decided Its Destination Yet, But Public Chains Have Already Started the Competition
Polymarket merely mentioned "chain migration," but the competition surrounding it has already begun.
After Stevens' post, multiple public chains including Solana, Sui, Algorand, MegaETH, and Sonic have extended olive branches. The keywords they emphasize are almost identical: lower fees, faster confirmations, higher performance, and an underlying environment more suitable for trading scenarios.
For any chain, Polymarket is not an ordinary application; it already has real users, real trading volume, and real market influence. Being able to host Polymarket would bring not only on-chain activity but also a benchmark case that can prove the chain's infrastructure capabilities to the market.
The pressure is especially direct for Polygon. Polymarket has long been one of the most important applications in the Polygon ecosystem. Recent market statistics show that Polymarket contributes millions of dollars in weekly Gas fees to Polygon, accounting for even more than half of Polygon's transaction fee income in some periods. In other words, Polymarket is not a "nice-to-have" ecosystem application but a significant source of on-chain revenue and real usage scenarios for Polygon.
Therefore, Polygon cannot afford not to be concerned. Faced with the signal of a potential chain change from Polymarket, Polygon has stated that it is still working with Polymarket to address the pain points and has not received formal migration notice. This statement, on one hand, aims to stabilize market sentiment, and on the other hand, indicates that Polygon does not want to lose one of the most important applications in its ecosystem.
However, the issue is that what Polymarket might need now is no longer just "optimizing the experience a bit." More block space, lower Gas, shorter block times—these demands point towards a重新选择 of the underlying trading environment. Polygon certainly still wants to keep Polymarket, but while other public chains are competing for it with performance, cost, and customization capabilities, Polymarket has already gained the leverage to重新选择 its underlying public chain.
After Scale Comes the Real Test for Polymarket
For Polymarket, having reached this point, the most difficult phase is just beginning. In the early growth stages of a product, the market discusses whether there is demand; when it truly achieves scale, growth pushes all the hidden backend problems to the forefront. Trading delays, order cancellations, settlement issues—in the short term, they affect the experience of a single order; in the long term, they erode users' patience to continue trading on the platform.
Therefore, what truly matters in this chain change isn't which chain Polymarket ultimately chooses, but whether it can transform the post-growth pressure into more stable trading capabilities. In the past, it proved that prediction markets can attract enough people; next, it needs to prove that when users truly start trading frequently and consistently, the system can still stably handle it. The first half of the prediction market is about bringing people in; the second half is about making those who stay dare to keep trading.
