被卡住的Polymarket：走过流量红利的真正大考来了

Original by Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author: Asher (@Asher_0210)

Last weekend, Josh Stevens, VP of DeFi Engineering at Polymarket, published a lengthy post, directly laying out the most pressing issue for the prediction market leader: The trading experience on Polymarket has recently deteriorated significantly.

For regular users, this feeling is more direct: prices are still displayed on the page, but clicking does nothing; an order is submitted, but the result is nowhere to be seen; sometimes after refreshing several times, users discover the trade never actually went through. An operation that should be simple has become laggy, hesitant, and even leaves users unsure if their order was placed at all.

In his post, Stevens also acknowledged that Polymarket's growth has massively outpaced its existing infrastructure's capacity, and the team had not scaled adequately beforehand. He then outlined a comprehensive engineering remediation 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 truly captured the market's attention was one relatively short but significant statement: Polymarket is proceeding with a "chain migration." In other words, Polymarket is switching chains.

Switching chains is not simply moving an application from one chain to another or building a new public chain; it means Polymarket is re-evaluating its fundamental trading environment. When a prediction market begins to function like an exchange, the underlying public chain is no longer just the backdrop; it becomes the ceiling.

When Polygon Goes from a Cost-Effective Option to a Growth Ceiling

Early on, running Polymarket on Polygon was not a wrong choice. For a prediction market still validating demand, Polygon was cheap enough, lightweight enough, and allowed users to trade and settle 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 based on constantly shifting probability prices. Prices need updating, orders need filling, positions need adjusting, and settlements need to keep up. The closer the product gets to a trading platform, the harder it becomes to hide the issues of the underlying public chain.

This is also the root cause of the recent poor user experience. Price delays, order cancellations, slow trade confirmations – in the early days, these were just sporadic minor issues. But when Polymarket handles higher-frequency trading, these problems directly become growth bottlenecks. What exchanges fear most isn't a lack of features, but users starting to doubt whether they can successfully execute trades.

Therefore, the "more blockspace, lower gas, and shorter block times" mentioned by Stevens are not just technical parameters; they are survival conditions for Polymarket's next phase. It no longer needs a chain that is "good enough," but an underlying infrastructure capable of handling a significant trading scale.

In other words, the real reason Polymarket is considering a chain migration isn't that Polygon suddenly became unusable, but that Polymarket has evolved from a prediction market application into a system more akin to an exchange. Consequently, Polygon has transitioned from a cost-effective option into a growth ceiling.

More Than Just a Chain Switch: Polymarket's Real Goal is Rebuilding the Trading System

Looking only at the term "chain migration" could easily lead one to interpret this update as a simple chain swap. However, based on the roadmap Stevens released, what Polymarket intends to change 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 handling limit orders, matching trades, and forming market depth. Stevens specifically emphasized that CLOB V2 is not a full rewrite and won't solve performance and stability issues alone; what truly matters is that Polymarket is rebuilding the CLOB from scratch.

This also indicates that Polymarket clearly understands that switching chains can only improve the settlement environment, not replace the upgrade of the trading system itself. If the order book, matching engine, interfaces, and risk control capabilities lag behind, user experience won't genuinely improve even if the underlying chain becomes faster.

Therefore, the other actions in this roadmap are understandable. Reducing on-chain data latency, fixing order cancellations, improving website performance, and launching a unified SDK and single WebSocket API are not piecemeal fixes; they are fundamentally building the foundational capabilities required for a trading platform.

More importantly, Perps are also on the way. Stevens mentioned that Polymarket's perpetual contracts will use new contracts, and the backend will also be built from scratch in Rust. For Polymarket, this means it will likely need to support not just event trading, but higher-frequency, more complex financial products that are closer to those of an exchange.

Thus, the chain migration is just the most visible step in this reconstruction. The real change is that Polymarket is moving from being a prediction market application towards becoming a trading infrastructure. What it needs to solve next is not just "which chain to run on," but "whether it can operate as stably as an exchange."

Polymarket Hasn't Decided Yet, but Public Chains are Already Courting

Polymarket merely mentioned "chain migration," but the competition for it has already begun.

After Stevens' post, multiple public chains including Solana, Sui, Algorand, MegaETH, and Sonic extended olive branches. The keywords they emphasize are almost identical: lower fees, faster confirmation, higher performance, and a more suitable environment for trading scenarios.

For any chain, Polymarket is not just any application. It already has real users, real trading volume, and real market influence. Being able to host Polymarket brings not just on-chain activity but also a benchmark case to prove its own infrastructural capabilities to the market.

The pressure is particularly acute for Polygon. Polymarket has long been one of the most important applications within the Polygon ecosystem. Recent market statistics show that Polymarket contributes millions of dollars in gas fees to Polygon weekly, even accounting for over half of Polygon's transaction fee revenue during certain periods. In other words, Polymarket is not a "dispensable" ecosystem application; it is a vital source of income and real use cases on the Polygon chain.

So, Polygon is naturally concerned. Facing the signal of a potential Polymarket departure, Polygon's side has stated it is still working with Polymarket to address relevant pain points and has not received an official migration notice. This stance aims to stabilize market sentiment on one hand, and on the other, indicates that Polygon does not want to lose one of its most critical applications.

But the problem is that what Polymarket needs now might be more than just "optimizing the experience." Demands for more blockspace, lower gas, and shorter block times point towards a fundamental re-selection of the underlying trading environment. Of course, Polygon wants to retain Polymarket, but when other public chains are vying for it with their performance, cost, and customization capabilities, Polymarket now holds the leverage to re-choose its underlying public chain.

The Real Test for Polymarket Comes After Scaling

Having reached its current state, Polymarket is actually entering its most difficult phase. In the early growth stages of a product, the market discusses whether there's demand. Once it truly scales, growth pushes all previously hidden backend issues to the forefront. Trading delays, order cancellations, settlement hiccups – in the short term, they affect a single order placement experience; in the long term, they erode a user's patience to continue trading on the platform.

So, the key point of this chain migration isn't which chain Polymarket will ultimately choose, but whether it can translate post-growth pressure into more stable trading capabilities. In the past, it proved that prediction markets could attract enough participants. Next, it must prove that when users start trading frequently and consistently, the system can still handle the load reliably. The first half of the prediction market game is bringing people in; the second half is making those who stay dare to keep trading.