Stuck Polymarket: The true test after riding the traffic dividend has arrived

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Asher (__@Asher_0210)_

Last weekend, Josh Stevens, Vice President of DeFi Engineering at Polymarket, published a long article and put the leading prediction market’s most troublesome recent problem directly on the table: Polymarket’s trading experience has clearly deteriorated recently.

For ordinary users, the feeling is even more immediate: the price is still shown on the page, but nothing happens when you click; orders are submitted, but the results keep taking too long to arrive; sometimes you refresh several times, only to find that the trade never actually succeeded. What should have been a relatively simple action starts to become laggy, hesitant, and even makes people doubt whether they have truly managed to buy in.

In his long article, Stevens also admits that Polymarket’s growth has already far outpaced the capacity of the existing infrastructure, and that the team had not done enough preparation for expansion beforehand. He then listed a whole set of engineering remediation plans, including reducing on-chain data latency, fixing transaction-cancellation issues, rebuilding the CLOB, improving website performance, rolling out a unified SDK and API, and advancing Perps, among other items.

But what truly caused the market to focus quickly was a short statement that nevertheless carried enormous weight: Polymarket is pushing forward with “chain migration.” In other words, Polymarket is changing chains.

Chain migration is not simply moving an application from one chain to another, or building a new public chain by oneself—it means Polymarket is reconsidering and reselecting its underlying trading environment. When prediction markets begin to operate like exchanges, the underlying public chain is no longer just background; it becomes the ceiling.

When Polygon shifts from a cost option to a growth ceiling

Early Polymarket ran on Polygon, and that was not the wrong choice. For a prediction market that is still validating demand, Polygon is cheap enough, lightweight enough, and allows users to complete trading and settlement at lower costs.

But today, Polymarket is no longer a low-frequency bet product. Users are no longer merely occasionally buying the outcome of an event; they are trading expectations within probability prices that keep changing. Prices need to be updated, orders need to be matched, positions need to be adjusted, and settlement needs to keep up. The closer the product gets to becoming a trading platform, the harder it is for issues with the underlying public chain to stay hidden.

This is also the root cause of the recent worsening experience. Price delays, order cancellations, and slow transaction confirmations might have been occasional minor problems early on; but when Polymarket takes on higher-frequency trading activity, these issues directly become bottlenecks for growth. What a trading platform fears most is not having too few features, but users starting to doubt whether they can successfully complete trades.

So when Stevens mentions more block space, lower Gas fees, and shorter block times, it is not just about technical parameters—it is Polymarket’s survival condition for the next stage. It no longer needs a chain that is merely “good enough”; it needs a set of underlying infrastructure that can handle trading scale.

In other words, the real reason Polymarket is considering chain migration this time is not that Polygon suddenly cannot be used—it is that Polymarket has grown from a prediction market application into a system much closer to an exchange. As a result, Polygon has shifted from a cost option to a growth ceiling.

Not just chain migration—what Polymarket truly needs is to redo its trading system

If you only look at the single term “chain migration,” it is easy to interpret this update as a simple chain relocation. But based on the roadmap Stevens published, what Polymarket is changing is not just the underlying public chain, but the entire trading system.

The most critical item is the rebuilding of the CLOB. The CLOB can be understood simply as the core order-book system of a trading platform, responsible for receiving limit orders, matching trades, and forming market depth. Stevens specifically emphasizes that CLOB V2 is not a complete rewrite, nor will it address performance and stability issues on its own; what matters most is that Polymarket is rebuilding the CLOB from scratch.

This also shows that Polymarket is clearly aware that changing chains can only improve the settlement environment and cannot replace upgrading the trading system itself. If the order book, matching, interfaces, and risk-control capabilities cannot keep up, even if the underlying chain becomes faster, the user experience will not truly improve.

So it is not hard to understand the other actions in this roadmap as well. Lowering on-chain data latency, fixing transaction cancellations, improving website performance, launching a unified SDK and a single WebSocket API—at their core, these are not isolated patches, but are about filling in the fundamental capabilities that a trading platform must have.

More importantly, Perps are also on the way. Stevens mentioned that Polymarket’s perpetual contracts will use brand-new contracts, and the backend will be rebuilt from zero using Rust. For Polymarket, this means that what it will need to support going forward may not only be event trading, but also higher-frequency, more complex financial products that are even closer to an exchange.

Therefore, chain migration is just the most visible step in this rebuild. The real change is that Polymarket is moving from a prediction market application toward a set of trading infrastructure. What it will solve next is not only “which chain to run on,” but “whether it can operate stably like an exchange.”

Polymarket hasn’t decided its destination yet, but public chains have already begun competing

Polymarket only mentioned “chain migration,” but the competition around it has already started.

After Stevens’ post, multiple public chains—including Solana, Sui, Algorand, MegaETH, Sonic, and others—have thrown out olive branches. The key terms they emphasize are almost identical: lower fees, faster confirmations, higher performance, and an underlying environment that is more suitable for trading scenarios.

For any chain, Polymarket is not a typical application. It already has real users, real trading volume, and real market influence. Once a chain can onboard Polymarket, the benefit is not only increased on-chain activity, but also a benchmark case that can demonstrate the chain’s infrastructure capability to the market.

For Polygon, the pressure is especially direct. 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, and in some periods even accounts for more than half of Polygon’s transaction-fee revenue. In other words, Polymarket is not a “nice-to-have” ecosystem app; it is an important source of Polygon’s on-chain revenue and real usage.

So Polygon cannot afford to be relaxed. In response to signals that Polymarket might change chains, Polygon has said that it is still working with Polymarket to address the related pain points and has not received an official migration notice. This kind of statement helps stabilize market sentiment on one hand, and on the other hand also indicates that Polygon does not want to lose one of the most important applications in its ecosystem.

But the problem is that what Polymarket now needs may no longer be merely “optimizing the experience.” More block space, lower Gas fees, and shorter block times point to a fundamental re-selection of the underlying trading environment. Polygon may still want to keep Polymarket, but when other public chains are using performance, cost, and customization capabilities to compete for it, Polymarket already has the leverage to reselect its underlying public chain.

After scale comes—the real test for Polymarket is next

For Polymarket, the hardest stage is actually just beginning. In the early growth phase of a product, the market is discussing whether there is demand. Once it truly reaches scale, growth brings all the hidden problems to the front. Trading latency, order cancellations, and settlement problems—short term, they affect the experience of placing orders; long term, they consume users’ patience to keep trading on the platform.

So what this chain migration truly needs to be judged on is not which chain Polymarket ultimately chooses, but whether it can turn post-growth pressure into more stable trading capability. In the past, it proved that prediction markets can attract enough people; next, it needs to prove that when users actually start trading frequently and continuously, the system can still reliably handle it. In the first half of prediction markets, it’s about bringing people in; in the second half, it’s about giving those who stay the confidence to keep trading.