Guide
Polymarket trading bot: how automated prediction market trading actually works
Polymarket runs an on-chain central limit order book, which means every quote, fill and settlement is readable programmatically. That makes it one of the easiest venues to automate — and one of the easiest to over-trade. This is what a working Polymarket bot does, where the edge comes from, and the guardrails you need before it touches real size.
How an automated Polymarket bot works
01Connect a wallet and authenticate to the CLOB
Orders on Polymarket are signed by your own wallet and posted to the order book, with balances held in USDC. A bot needs signing access, an allowance for the exchange contracts, and a way to track pending versus filled orders without double-submitting.
02Stream the book, not just the last price
A mid-price tells you almost nothing on a thin market. A bot subscribes to live book updates for its whitelisted markets and works from depth on each side, spread width, and recent trade prints so it can distinguish a real move from a single small taker.
03Score the market against a model
Each candidate market gets a fair-value estimate — from a news model, a correlated market, an on-chain signal, or a base rate. The bot only acts when the book price diverges from that estimate by more than the round-trip cost of crossing the spread.
04Route, size and journal every order
Position size comes from a bankroll rule rather than conviction. Every submission, cancel and fill is written to a ledger with a timestamp so realised P&L, hit rate and slippage can be attributed back to the strategy that produced them.
Strategies traders automate
Passive market making
Quote both sides inside a wide spread on markets with steady flow and collect the difference. This is the most capital-efficient Polymarket strategy because there is no headline maker fee — but it is also the most exposed to being run over by informed flow, so quotes must widen or pull on news.
Cross-venue arbitrage
The same real-world question is often listed on both Polymarket and Kalshi at different prices. A bot watching both books can take the cheap side and hedge the other, locking a spread that is independent of the outcome — provided the contract wording and resolution sources genuinely match.
Complementary-pair arbitrage
Within a mutually exclusive market set, the YES prices across all outcomes should sum to roughly one. When they drift meaningfully above or below, a bot can buy or sell the basket and hold to resolution.
News and signal-driven entries
Polymarket reprices fast on headlines but not instantly, and not evenly across related markets. A bot with a fast news or social feed can take the obvious leg early and, more usefully, the correlated markets that have not moved yet.
Resolution-decay harvesting
As a market nears settlement with an obvious outcome, contracts trade at 95-99c and grind toward one. Systematically buying that last few cents is a high-hit-rate, low-payoff strategy that only survives with strict position limits and a hard rule against ambiguous resolution language.
Risk controls that matter
A bot without limits is just a faster way to lose money. Every automation you run in Infiniti sits behind hard, server-side guardrails:
- Per-order and per-market notional caps, enforced before the order is signed.
- A daily loss limit that flattens open exposure and halts the bot until you re-enable it.
- A market whitelist with minimum book depth and maximum spread, so nothing quotes into an empty book.
- A resolution buffer that blocks new risk in the final hours before settlement.
- Slippage and price-band checks that reject any fill worse than your model's tolerance.
- A kill switch and a full audit trail of every order the automation submitted.
What is specific to Polymarket
Gas and on-chain settlement
Every interaction ultimately settles on-chain in USDC. Strategies that churn quotes must account for network costs and for the fact that a cancel is not always instant — inventory risk during that window is real.
Oracle resolution and dispute windows
Polymarket markets resolve against an oracle with a dispute period. A bot holding to expiry is taking resolution-ambiguity risk, not just price risk, so it should down-weight markets whose wording leaves room for interpretation.
Long-tail depth
Polymarket's breadth is its edge and its trap. The mispricings are largest in the long tail, where exiting early can be impossible. Size those positions as hold-to-resolution bets, not as trades.
Run it inside Infiniti
Infiniti Terminal connects your Polymarket account, streams the live book, runs AI research over it, and executes and journals every fill in one ledger — so backtest, live P&L and audit trail all read from the same data.
FAQ
Are trading bots allowed on Polymarket?
Yes. Polymarket exposes public CLOB and data APIs, and programmatic order flow is a normal part of the book. You are responsible for signing orders with your own wallet and for complying with the access rules in your jurisdiction.
Do I need to write code to run a Polymarket bot?
Not in Infiniti. You configure a strategy, its size limits and its trigger conditions, and the terminal handles authentication, order routing and journaling. Writing your own client against the CLOB API is still an option if you want full control.
What does it cost to run a bot on Polymarket?
Polymarket has historically not charged a headline maker/taker fee, so your real costs are spread, slippage and on-chain gas. High-frequency quoting strategies are dominated by those costs, not by a fee schedule.
How do I stop a bot from blowing up an account?
Cap per-order and per-market notional, set a daily loss limit that flattens and halts, restrict the bot to a whitelist of markets with a minimum book depth, and require a resolution buffer so it stops adding risk close to settlement.
Educational information only, not financial advice. Automated trading carries risk of loss. Fee schedules, API terms and eligibility rules change — confirm current terms with Polymarket before deploying capital.