Choose an open Polymarket outcome, such as the Yes side of “Will X happen?”, then name your coin and launch it. Launching is free apart from Robinhood Chain gas, and you can make the first buy yourself.
Creators earn 0.7% of every trade, forever.
02
Trade the odds
Every coin trades against a pToken: a 1:1 claim on a real outcome share Polypad holds on Polymarket. So its price moves with buying and selling and with the live odds. Coins start on a bonding curve at about $2.4k market cap.
1% per trade: 70% to the creator, 30% to Polypad.
03
Graduate, then resolve
At about $6k raised the curve sells out and the coin moves into a Uniswap v4 pool in the same transaction, liquidity locked. Sells always work; buys pause from the market’s end date until it resolves. If the outcome wins its pToken is worth $1 and trading carries on both ways. If it loses, the backing is worth $0 and only sells remain.
Pay and receive USDG, with a 0.25% conversion spread.
Put a coin on your conviction
Launching takes one transaction and costs only gas. The curve, the graduation into Uniswap v4 and the fee split are set up for you, and the coin follows the market, whichever way it breaks.
Open a coin, choose Buy, and enter how many dollars to spend. The panel shows how many coins you get and the least you will accept.
The first time only, your wallet asks you to let the Polypad Router spend your USDG. This approval is unlimited, so you sign it once and every later buy is a single confirmation.
Confirm the trade. Your coins arrive in the same transaction, a second or two later.
Selling works the same way: enter how many coins to sell, confirm, and USDG arrives in the same transaction. The first sale of each coin asks for a one-time approval of that coin, again unlimited, so later sales are one confirmation.
You can withdraw an approval at any time from your wallet or a token-approval manager. The Router only takes your tokens in a transaction you send yourself.
A buy or a sale for dollars converts between USDG and the outcome’s shares at Polymarket’s live price. When you trade, Polypad reads the Polymarket order book for your exact size and signs a price, the quote, which travels inside your transaction. The exchange contract checks the signature, so nobody can trade at a price Polypad did not sign.
A quote lives for 10 seconds (3 seconds while a game is being played). Confirm within that window; if it expires, the transaction fails without moving your funds and you can simply retry.
Buys pay what the shares cost on Polymarket’s book for your size, sells get what the book pays. Bigger trades walk deeper into the book, so on a thin book a big buy costs more per share, the way a big buy moves any memecoin. The price is shown before you sign.
A buy is never turned away for the state of the book. Bigger than everything on offer, it is priced 2¢ above the last ask; with nothing on offer at all, at 99.9¢.
The 0.25% exchange spread is included in the quote you see.
The coin side of your trade happens on the curve or pool, and someone else’s trade can land just before yours. Your max slippage (1% by default, adjustable from 0.1% to 5% with the ⚙ next to the amount) sets the least you accept. If the price moves past it, the trade fails instead of filling worse, and you only pay gas.
Buying almost never is: a thin book, a fast move or a hiccup on Polypad’s side makes a buy cost a little more, never stops it. What can still turn a trade away, before you sign it:
Message
Why
What to do
Settling
Polymarket has closed the market and Polypad is recording its result, which takes effect an hour later.
Wait for the result: if the outcome happened, buying reopens at $1. Selling keeps working.
Odds moving fast (sales)
The Polymarket price is jumping and its range is unknown, so a sale price could be stale by the time it lands.
Retry in a few seconds, or sell for shares (below).
Too large for the book (sales)
Polymarket’s buyers cannot take that many shares right now.
Sell a smaller amount, or sell for shares (below).
One-sided book (sales)
Nobody on Polymarket is buying these shares.
Retry shortly, or sell for shares (below).
Quotes unavailable
Polypad’s pricing service could not be reached. It runs on more than one machine, so this is rare.
Nothing stops for a date. Past the end date, and all through a live game, a coin trades both ways for as long as Polymarket trades its market. Quotes are shorter then (3 seconds), since the result can land any moment.
When Polymarket closes the market, buying waits while Polypad records the result, which takes effect an hour later. Selling keeps working throughout.
If the outcome happened, buying reopens and the coin trades as usual, both ways. Its shares are now a fixed $1, so only demand for the coin moves its price, and trades no longer need a quote.
If it didn’t, the shares are worth $0: buying with dollars stays closed, and selling is all that remains. See Resolution and disputes.
You can also sell a coin for the outcome’s shares (its pToken) instead of dollars. This needs no quote and nothing from Polypad’s servers: it is a plain call to the Router (sellForShares), priced by the curve or pool alone, with only the coin’s trading fee. It is the way out that always works, even if our services were offline. The pToken can be held, sold for USDG later, or cashed out at $1 or $0 when the market resolves. Today this is available through the contracts and the API (/v1/swap?…&receive=shares); a button on the site is coming.
Sales are paid from the exchange’s USDG float, which Polypad keeps topped up from the desk. If a sale ever needs more than the float holds, it still goes through: the rest is recorded on chain as owed to you, at the exact amount, and paid automatically, oldest first, as the float refills (usually within minutes).
Once a market has resolved, payouts for its shares are paid at up to $100,000 or half the float an hour, whichever is more. A larger payout is paid in part at once and the rest an hour later, at the same price. This is a safety brake on settled markets only: sales at a live price are never delayed.
Coins are ordinary ERC-20 tokens. After graduation they trade in a standard Uniswap v4 pool, and terminals can list them and trade them through the Polypad API. Holder rewards follow your balance wherever you bought (see Fees and rewards), and Contracts and API has the details for builders.
