Polymarket for beginners: how markets work and how they resolve

Polymarket is an exchange where you buy shares in an outcome at a price between $0 and $1, and each share pays $1.00 if the outcome happens and $0.00 if it does not. You trade with other users, not with a house. Takers pay a small fee on some markets, makers pay nothing, and when the event is over the answer is settled through UMA’s oracle, not by Polymarket’s staff. This guide explains those mechanics from Polymarket’s and UMA’s own documentation: what a share is, how money gets in and out, what the fee costs, how a market resolves, what happens in a dispute, and where the site is closed to you. It is not a strategy guide, and nothing here says you will make money.

What Polymarket is and who runs it

Polymarket’s documentation describes a peer-to-peer order book on Polygon: “Instead of betting against a house, you trade shares with other users in an open, peer-to-peer market.” Shares are tokens in your own wallet, and the help centre calls the platform non-custodial: “we never take possession of your USDC”, and you can export your private key. That is the first difference from a crypto casino, where your deposit becomes a balance in the operator’s books.

There are two Polymarkets. The international site, polymarket.com, carries the footer “Adventure One QSS Inc.” and states that it “is not regulated by the CFTC and operates independently”. Polymarket US is a separate app run by QCX LLC, which a CFTC staff letter of 2 September 2025 describes as a designated contract market. The accounts are not connected. The CFTC’s 2022 order against the original operator says it began offering event markets “beginning around June 2020”. For scale, Polymarket traded $10.57 billion in March 2026, its first month above $10 billion, per The Block. My Polymarket review scores the whole package; this guide only covers how it works.

A share is a price between $0 and $1

Every market is a question with outcomes, usually “Yes” and “No”. Each outcome trades between $0 and $1. If “Yes” trades at 18¢, the market as a whole is pricing that outcome at roughly 18%. When the market resolves, winning shares redeem for $1.00 and losing shares for $0.00. The documentation adds a third case: a market resolved “Unknown/50-50” redeems every share at $0.50.

You do not have to wait for the end. The docs list “Exit anytime” by selling before resolution, as long as someone takes the other side at a price you accept. If you bought at 18¢ and the price moves to 30¢, selling turns $18 into $30 before fees. If it moves to 5¢, selling turns it into $5. That is the whole product: a price that moves until it becomes 0 or 1.

Getting money in and out

Trading collateral is pUSD, which the docs describe as “a standard ERC-20 token on Polygon, backed by USDC”. Polymarket moved from USDC.e to pUSD on 28 April 2026. You do not need to hold either beforehand: the bridge accepts deposits from Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, BNB Smart Chain, Solana, Bitcoin, Tron and others, and they “are automatically converted to pUSD on Polygon”.

• Minimum deposits. The bridge docs list $2 on most chains, $7 on Ethereum and $9 on Bitcoin and Tron. The help centre gives different examples, so read the number on the deposit screen.
• Fees. Polymarket says it charges no fee to deposit or withdraw, “though intermediaries like Coinbase or MoonPay may charge their own fees”. Network fees on the chain you use still apply.
• Withdrawals. Portfolio, withdraw, then address, token, amount and network. I have not timed one yet; when I do, the hash goes on the payout tests page.
• Identity. Sign-up on polymarket.com is by Google, email with a six-digit code, or a wallet such as MetaMask, with no identity step in the guide. Polymarket US is the opposite: legal name, address, date of birth, phone and Social Security number, plus ID and selfie if needed, before any deposit.

Pick the network before you send. A coin on the wrong chain is a recovery problem, not a Polymarket problem.

Orders, makers, takers and the fee

Polymarket uses a central limit order book. If you place a limit order that rests on the book and waits for someone else, you are the maker. If your order fills immediately against a resting one, you are the taker. The fee schedule depends on that difference. “Makers are never charged fees.” Takers pay on certain markets only, by this formula:

fee = C × feeRate × p × (1 − p), where C is the number of shares and p the price.

The 50¢ figures are the documentation’s own examples; the 10¢ column is my arithmetic with the same formula. Because of the p × (1 − p) term, the fee is highest at 50¢ and shrinks toward zero near $0 or $1. Fees are rounded to five decimals, and part of what takers pay goes back to makers as daily rebates of 15% to 25%, per the fee page. How that compares with a bookmaker’s margin is worked out in the prediction markets vs sports betting guide.

The fee is not the only cost. The spread is the gap between the best bid and the best ask, and crossing it costs you that gap. On a liquid market it is small: on 6 October 2026 the October Fed decision market showed “no change” at 0.81 bid and 0.82 ask. On a thin market the spread can cost more than the fee. The help centre also says the order book has no trading size limits by design, but a large order can move the price against you.

How a market resolves

Every market page carries its rules: a resolution source, an end date and the edge cases. Those rules, not the title, decide who gets paid. When the end date passes, Polymarket asks UMA’s Optimistic Oracle for the answer. Short “up or down” price markets use Chainlink price data instead, per the docs.

1. Proposal. Anyone can propose the outcome by posting a bond. The developer docs say the bond is “typically $750 pUSD”; the help centre also says $750, in an article written in USDC.e terms before the April 2026 migration.
2. Challenge window. Two hours. If nobody disputes the proposal, the market settles on it.
3. Settlement. A correct proposer gets the bond back plus a reward. A wrong one forfeits the bond. Winning shares become redeemable at $1.00.

The documentation puts an undisputed resolution at about two hours after the proposal. The “optimistic” part is the assumption that a proposal is right unless someone with money at stake says otherwise.

When a resolution is disputed

A disputer has to post a counter-bond equal to the proposer’s. Polymarket’s docs describe a first dispute leading to a second proposal, and a further dispute going to UMA’s Data Verification Mechanism, the DVM. That is a vote of UMA token holders, not of Polymarket’s staff and not of the traders in the market.

• Debate. The docs allow 24 to 48 hours for discussion before the vote.
• Vote. UMA’s documentation describes a 24-hour commit period, when votes are submitted hidden, and a 24-hour reveal period.
• Penalties. The side that loses the vote forfeits its bond. UMA’s docs say stakers who do not vote, or vote with the minority, are slashed.
• Timing. Polymarket puts a disputed market at four to six days in total.

Two consequences matter for a beginner. Your money is locked in the position until the vote ends, unless you sell to someone at a discount. And the outcome is what the voters decide the rules say, which is why the wording matters more than your view of what “really” happened. I have not yet verified a specific disputed market from a primary source for this version, so I name none.

Reading the rules before you trade

The resolution page has one instruction worth quoting: “Always read the resolution rules before trading.” I would add a checklist.

• The source. Which publication, agency or data feed decides the answer. If the source is slow or ambiguous, so is your payout.
• The end date and time zone. “By 31 December” means nothing until you know whose midnight.
• The edge cases. What happens if the event is postponed, cancelled, partly happens or is reported differently by two sources.
• The 50-50 path. When a market can resolve “Unknown/50-50”, a share you bought at 90¢ can come back at 50¢.
• The category. It sets the taker fee rate in the table above.

A bet at a sportsbook is graded against an official result and house rules. A Polymarket contract is only as good as its text. The fee you save does not cover a resolution you did not read.

Where you can and cannot use it

polymarket.com shows US visitors a banner: “Trading is blocked in the United States on polymarket.com. Switch to polymarket.us.” The help centre says US users “cannot deposit funds or place trades on the website”. The history behind it: on 3 January 2022 the CFTC ordered Blockratize, Inc., trading as Polymarket, to pay a $1.4 million penalty for offering event-based binary options without registration, and to wind down the non-compliant markets.

Outside the US, Polymarket publishes two lists that do not match exactly.

• The developer docs block Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea and occupied regions of Ukraine completely. They list as close-only, on the website and the API, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, Taiwan, Thailand and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Ireland, Japan, Malta (sports only), the Netherlands and South Korea are close-only on the website only.
• The help centre lists 39 countries as “completely restricted”, including several of the above plus Russia, Venezuela and others, and says permissions follow your physical location.

The terms also forbid getting around this: “Polymarket strictly prohibits the use of VPNs or similar tools to bypass geographic restrictions”, citing Section 2.1.4. From Italy I can browse every market and cannot trade. These lists are Polymarket’s own rules, not a statement of what the law says where you are. Regulators’ actions, country by country, are in the legality guide.

What Polymarket does not give you

There is no welcome bonus. The extras are a holding reward of 3.25% annualised on eligible positions, which the help centre calls variable, maker rebates, and a referral share of fees. There is no house to limit a winning account: the help centre says “There is no ‘house’ to ban you for winning too much”. There is also no licence-backed complaint route on the international site, and support is a chat icon plus support@polymarket.com. Its Trustpilot page showed a 1.3 score from 643 reviews on 6 October 2026, with no replies to the 304 negative ones.

The home menu now includes Perps, advertised with leverage “up to 20x”. That is a different product from a $0–$1 share, with liquidation risk, and nothing in this guide applies to it.

If you want to bet on the same events at a bookmaker instead, books such as Bovada and Cloudbet grade bets against house rules and build their margin into the odds, and both publish restricted lists in their terms. Roobet’s menu shows a “Predictions” tab I have not tested; the Roobet review says so.

The short version

A Polymarket share costs between $0 and $1 and pays $1.00, $0.00 or, in a 50-50 resolution, $0.50. Makers pay no fee; takers pay C × rate × p × (1 − p), at most $1.75 on $50 of crypto shares at 50¢. Markets settle through UMA: a $750 bond, a two-hour window, and a token-holder vote taking four to six days if anyone disputes. Read the resolution source, end date and edge cases before you buy, and check Polymarket’s restricted list for where you physically are. The prediction markets category lists the platforms I have reviewed.