Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Asher (@Asher_0210)

Last weekend, Josh Stevens, Vice President of DeFi Engineering at Polymarket, published a long article, placing the most troublesome issue facing this leading prediction market directly on the table: Recently, the trading experience on Polymarket has noticeably worsened.

For ordinary users, this feeling is even more direct: the prices on the page are still there, but nothing happens when you click; orders are submitted, yet results are delayed; sometimes after refreshing several times, you finally find that the trades did not succeed at all. What should have been a very light operation begins to feel sluggish, hesitant, and even makes one unsure if they have actually made a purchase.

In the lengthy article, Stevens also acknowledged that Polymarket’s growth has significantly exceeded the capacity of its existing infrastructure, and the team did not prepare adequately for scaling. He then listed a comprehensive engineering rectification plan, including reducing on-chain data latency, fixing order cancellation issues, rebuilding CLOB, improving website performance, launching a unified SDK and API, and advancing Perps.

However, what truly captured the market's attention was a short but impactful statement: Polymarket is advancing "chain migration." In other words, Polymarket is planning to switch chains.

Switching chains is not simply moving an application from one chain to another or creating a new public chain; it means that Polymarket is reselecting its underlying trading environment. As prediction markets begin to operate like exchanges, the underlying public chain is no longer just a backdrop but becomes the ceiling.

When Polygon Changes from a Cost Option to a Growth Limit

In its early days, Polymarket running on Polygon was not a wrong choice. For a prediction market still validating demand, Polygon is cheap enough, lightweight enough, and allows users to complete trades and settlements at a low cost.

But today's Polymarket is no longer a low-frequency betting product. Users no longer just occasionally buy the outcome of an event but trade expectations within constantly changing probability prices. Prices need to update, orders need to execute, positions need to adjust, and settlements need to keep up. The closer the product gets to being a trading platform, the harder it becomes to hide the issues of the underlying public chain.

This is also the root of the recent decline in experience. Price delays, order cancellations, slow trade confirmations were merely occasional minor issues in the early days; but as Polymarket undertakes higher frequency trading actions, these problems can directly become growth bottlenecks. The greatest fear of a trading platform is not a lack of functionality, but that users begin to doubt whether they can successfully complete trades.

Therefore, the more block space, lower gas fees, and shorter block times that Stevens mentioned are not just technical parameters but survival conditions for the next stage of Polymarket. It needs not just a "sufficient" chain but a set of underlying infrastructure capable of handling trading scale.

In other words, the real reason Polymarket is considering a chain switch is not that Polygon suddenly became unusable, but that Polymarket has evolved from a prediction market application into a system closer to an exchange. Consequently, Polygon has shifted from being a cost option to a growth limit.

It's More than a Chain Switch; Polymarket Truly Needs to Redo its Trading System

If we only look at the term "chain migration," it is easy to understand this update as merely a simple chain switch. However, from the roadmap released by Stevens, what Polymarket wants to change is not just the underlying public chain, but the entire trading system.

The most critical item is the reconstruction of CLOB. CLOB can be simply understood as the core order book system of a trading platform, responsible for handling limit orders, matching trades, and forming market depth. Stevens particularly emphasized that CLOB V2 is not a complete rewrite and will not solely address performance and stability issues; what is truly important is that Polymarket is rebuilding CLOB from the ground up.

This also indicates that Polymarket is well aware that switching chains can improve the settlement environment but cannot replace the need to upgrade the trading system itself. If the order book, matching, interfaces, and risk control capabilities do not keep up, even if the underlying chain speeds up, the user experience will not truly improve.

Thus, the other actions in this roadmap are not difficult to understand. Lowering on-chain data latency, fixing order cancellations, improving website performance, and launching a unified SDK and a single WebSocket API are fundamentally not piecemeal repairs but are addressing the basic capabilities that a trading platform must have.

More importantly, Perps are also on the way. Stevens mentioned that Polymarket's perpetual contracts will use entirely new contracts, and the backend will be built from scratch with Rust. For Polymarket, this means that what it will soon support may involve not just event trading but also more frequent, more complex, and more exchange-like financial products.

Therefore, switching chains is just the most visible step in this reconstruction. The real change is that Polymarket is moving closer to a trading infrastructure from being a prediction market application. What it needs to resolve next is not just "which chain to run on" but "can it operate as stably as an exchange."

Polymarket Has Yet to Decide Its Direction, But Public Chains Have Already Started Competing

Polymarket only mentioned "chain reform," but the competition surrounding it has already begun.

After Stevens's article, multiple public chains like Solana, Sui, Algorand, MegaETH, and Sonic have extended olive branches. They all emphasize similar keywords: lower fees, faster confirmations, higher performance, and a more suitable underlying environment for trading scenarios.

For any public chain, Polymarket is not an ordinary application; it already has real users, real trading volume, and real market influence. If it can take on Polymarket, it would not just bring on-chain activity but would also become a benchmark case that proves its infrastructure capabilities to the market.

For Polygon, the pressure is particularly direct. Polymarket has long been one of the most important applications in the Polygon ecosystem. Recent market statistics indicate that Polymarket contributes millions of dollars in gas fees to Polygon each week, even accounting for more than half of Polygon's transaction fee revenue during certain periods. In other words, Polymarket is not a " dispensable" ecological application but an important source of on-chain revenue and real usage scenarios for Polygon.

Therefore, Polygon naturally cannot afford to be indifferent. In response to the signals that Polymarket may switch chains, representatives from Polygon have stated that they are still collaborating with Polymarket to address related pain points and have not received formal notice of migration. This statement serves both to stabilize market sentiment and to demonstrate that Polygon does not want to lose one of the most important applications in its ecosystem.

However, the problem is that what Polymarket wants now may no longer be just "optimizing the experience." More block space, lower gas fees, and shorter block times point to a re-evaluation of the underlying trading environment. Polygon certainly wants to retain Polymarket, but as other public chains compete using performance, cost, and customization capabilities, Polymarket already has leverage in reselecting its underlying public chain.

After Scale, Polymarket's True Test Begins

As Polymarket reaches this point, the most challenging phase has just begun. In the early stages of a product's growth, the market is discussing whether there is demand; when it truly forms scale, growth pushes all underlying problems to the forefront. Trade delays, order cancellations, and settlement issues may affect one order experience in the short term, but they consume users' patience to continue trading on the platform in the long term.

Therefore, what truly needs to be watched during this chain switch is not which chain Polymarket will ultimately choose, but whether it can convert the pressure after growth into more stable trading capabilities. In the past, it proved that the prediction market could attract a sufficient number of people; next, it must prove that, when users start trading frequently and continuously, the system can still support stability. The first half of the prediction market is bringing people in; the second half is ensuring that those who stay dare to continue trading.

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